From:
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-24170,00.html

A SLEW of new handsets, an upstart operating system and a battle over
wireless technologies dominated the massive GSMA mobile conference in
Barcelona last week.

With carrier revenue streams shifting from voice calls to data, the show,
which attracted more than 55,000 people, was filled with demonstrations of
what shape mobile communications will take in the next couple of years.

Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo used a number of high-profile speaking
engagements to trumpet the company's Next G network, announcing plans to
boost peak data speeds to 42 megabits per second by 2009 and 100 Mbps after
that.

"We all remember the days we first rolled out 3G and most of us are still
yawning - we didn't see much change in consumer behaviour," he said. "We
took a billion dollar bet to change that."

Speaking to The Australian IT, Mr Trujillo said the industry now regarded
Australia as a world leader in mobile services. "People are busy talking
about the US, Europe, India and China, but we are now leading the world in
this wireless phase," he said.

He said the company would continue working with vendor partner Ericsson to
upgrade the network using HSPA+ and an emerging technology called LTE (Long
Term Evolution) that would eventually deliver speeds of more than 100 Mbps.

Mr Trujillo said he had spent considerable time at the GSMA event looking
for new services that could be rolled out by Telstra to take advantage of
the planned speed increases on the network.

"There are some exciting things here in terms of delivery of content," he
said. "We are starting to see the integration, not just of pre-packaged, but
also self-generated content. It's going to be very interesting."

Supporters of the LTE broadband technology chosen by Telstra used the show
to highlight what they say are its significant advantages over rival
standard WiMax. WiMax proponent Intel used its stand to extol the virtues of
the technology, emphasising that it was already commercially available and
being rolled out by carriers around the world.