From today customers of T-Mobile's Mobile Broadband service will become the first UK surfers to benefit from an enhancement to 3G High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technology that enables faster uploads. The operator is introducing High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), which will push upstream speeds to a maximum of 1.4Mbps.

Currently most UK operators utilise HSDPA, which is chiefly designed to improve download (downlink) speeds and only increases upstream performance to 384Kbps, which is an improvement over the original 3G UTMS specification of 64Kbps. Happily T-Mobile is also improving its HSDPA performance to offer speeds of up to 7.2Mbps in Greater London, which should make them comparable to Vodafone's.

Naturally the real-world performance of such services can be highly variable, perhaps even more so than their land-line (ADSL etc.) counterparts. Most customers can, at best, expect to receive roughly half of the maximum rate. However, as networks and capacity improve then it is possible that real-world performance may follow suit. Future implementations of HSDPA technology could also push download speeds up to a maximum of 14.4Mbps.

Prices for T-Mobile's Mobile Broadband services start at £15 per month for Web'n'walk Plus, which offers a fair usage (FUP) data cap of 3GigaByte's (GB) per month, albeit at the behest of a 24 month contract. The service also restricts the use of certain applications, such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) traffic.

Note that rollout of T-Mobile's faster speeds will take some time, with major cities being targetted for upgrade before the end of this year.