Ericsson used a packed press conference as a venue to plug its latest developments in LTE and HSPA. Company CEO and President Carl-Henric Svanberg said that there are 174 HSPA networks in 76 countries with an estimated 180 million HSPA subscribers. He added that data traffic now exceeds voice traffic from up to 50 percent to 1,500 percent depending upon the operator strategy.
Ericsson also used the press conference as a platform for one of its premiere customers. Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo talked about his company's success with HSDPA in the 850 MHz spectrum. Telstra deployed HSDPA in 10 months and now estimates that up to 35 percent of its base is 3G and expects to reach a 60 percent penetration of 3G by 2010.
Trujillo says that the company is planning to evolve its network to 4G using LTE. In 2008 he plans to increase the speed of the 3G network to 21 Mbps and by 2009, he expects to increase it to 42 Mbps.
In other Ericsson news, the company plans to demonstrate an end-to-end LTE call on handheld devices at Mobile World Congress. LTE, which supports data rates of up to 160 Mbps, is expected to launch commercially in 2009.