Italy to Get Superfast Mobile Broadband Service

If the latest news flow from several countries is to go by, UK may soon find itself way behind other countries in 3g broadband development. Italy is now all set to join the league of countries with a super fast mobile broadband network.

Telecom Italia, in collaboration with the Sweden based Ericsson has been working on a 28 Mb mobile service and expects to launch the service in the next few months. Milan residents will be the first to experience the service this June. The rest of Italy will follow in the second part of this year.

The announcement follows similar news from Australia, with Telstra, the Australian telecommunication company declaring the commercial launch of a 21 Mb mobile broadband service for its business customers and a general release expected in April this year.

The Italian network is yet to announce the price of their service, but going by the steep price being charged for the Australian service, there is reason to believe that the Italians too will have to pay a little extra to avail the service.

Ericsson, which is employing its network expertise in the Italian network, is also at the forefront of the HSPA technology. The network will incorporate a novel technology, Multiple Input and Multiple Output, which makes data transmission reach much higher speeds by using multiple antenna branches. This allows for a greater download speed to the end user. In reality though, as any broadband user will tell you, the end user speeds hardly ever attain the theoretical maximum. This is usually because the actual speed is determined by various local factors like the weather, network traffic, and distance from the transmission tower.