Mobile phone based broadband technologies (3G [UMTS] / 3.5G [HSDPA]) suffer from many restrictions, chief among them being a limited 64Kbps upload speed. Thankfully Qualcomm has now developed HSUPA, which is capable of increasing upstream speeds to 2Mbps!

Qualcomm has already begun anticipating the inception of HSUPA laptop datacards by as soon as next year. Quite what this would mean for the infantile Mobile WiMAX technology is not known, although HSUPA still has a few hills of its own to climb.

Typically there's no guarantee that mobile operators will choose to adopt the technology or that it would even work as intended in a real-world environments. Having said that, fears over WiMAX could make HSUPA seem quite attractive.