Europe : T-Mobile achieved a first for German carriers in the week when it held a live demonstration of HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) under real conditions in Berlin.

In a pilot project, passengers could call up traffic information, for example, from the Internet or watch video films from a vehicle equipped with a notebook and HSDPA data cards on journeys through Berlin. Bandwidths of much more than one megabit per second were achieved during the mobile data transfer between the car and transmitter. That means mobile applications at DSL speed for people on the move are now a reality.

“The success of this project shows that HSDPA is past the laboratory stage of the pipeline. The data turbo will be available in our network from as soon as early next year. We have full control of our ’seamless mobilit’ approach - in other words, expanding seamless, integrated network platforms," explained Joachim Horn, Director of technology at T-Mobile Deutschland. "But we are not becoming submerged in technical gimmicks, and instead are concentrating on specific benefits for customers - which fully complies with our strategy: the technology itself is not of interest to customers, just the benefits it brings."

HSDPA is an enhancement of UMTS, the third generation of mobile communications. To make it possible to use the technology, T-Mobile is equipping UMTS base stations with special software components.

With HSDPA-based applications, mobile surfing on the Internet and services with a high data volume, such as music downloads, will be even faster in future. Customers can already use mobile communications in over 750 towns and communities via T-Mobile’s UMTS network. That corresponds to coverage of over 50 percent of the population.