INQ1Watch: Misc musings, 3’s new mobile broadband with T-Mobile

Also at the 3 event they drew a line under their mobile broadband offerings, as in how it’s been so far, what’s coming up next and the overall story.

It doesn’t really fall under the remit of the INQ handsets. Although it does ever so tentatively fall into the data services category which backs nicely into their new phone, so we let them have their 5 minutes.

They went on to show a slide which highlighted the amount of data that’s traveled over their mobile broadband network.

As you might not be able to see the figures all that well, it’s risen from 25,000 GB in November 2007 to just under 800,000 GB throughput from last month.

Not a bad overall feat we believe to date. To truly call it splendiferous you really have to factor in their coverage region and balance it up against other networks, so the jury is still out.

They did go on to state they do have the largest mobile broadband network in the UK, with 98% of it being on HSDPA at 3.6Mbps.

Where 3 see themselves next is more of an interesting topic we believe, and it’s here we pricked our ears up and paid thorough attention. Not that we weren’t beforehand.

They’ve combined their efforts with T-Mobile to produce the world’s largest HSDPA and HSUPA network. It’s hoped by Q3 2010, they’ll jointly have 98% of the possible broadband coverage of the UK. It’s also aimed they’ll have speeds of 14.5Mbps downstream and 5.7Mbps upstream, a nice throughput you’ll agree.

It must have slipped this hacks mind about T-Mobile and 3 jointly establishing this project, as notes over this were feverishly scribbled down only to find out this was all made public a while ago.

Oh well, you learn something new every day only to find out it wasn’t so new after all and you wish what you know should have been known before hand.