BARCELONA--The industry is working fast to offer high-speed data connection to portal devices, but the market has split into two camps: one stands by wireless standards such as WiMax and Wi-Fi, while the other supports mobile technology 3G and HSDPA.
Wireless broadband technologies Wi-Fi and more recently WiMax are among the hot favorites. WiMax can support Web connection of up to 75Mbps and a single base station can cover an area with a radius of up to 30 miles. But mobile standards 3G and High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), are fast becoming hot buzzwords. HSDPA is a beefed up version of the Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) 3G technology that specifically improves the downlink speed, and is capable of supporting data connection of up to 1.4Mbps. Wi-Fi and WiMax have been largely confined to facilitating high-speed connectivity to laptops and PDAs, while 3G and HSDPA have focused on mobile phones. However, there are now suggestions that 3G can be extended to laptops, particularly as the data speeds offered by these mobile standards catch up to those provided by WiMax or Wi-Fi.