The service will be rolled out to the top 5 cities during 2007

Feb 15, 2007 13:38 GMT  ·  By

Orange has announced that it will be upgrading its 3G network in the UK to HSDPA this year, dubbed Orange 3G+. Orange's 3G network currently covers 90 percent of the UK, but the HSDPA enabled 3G+ service will be concentrating only on the commercial areas including London and major airports.

According to the mobile operator, the top 5 cities will be getting HSDPA at a certain time during this year. Along with the upgrade of the network, Orange will be providing a wide choice of HSDPA-enabled handsets and a range of data cards that can be fitted to laptops and other devices.

The 3G mobile telephony protocol allows much higher data speeds, current HSDPA deployments supporting 1.8Mbps, 3.6Mbps and 7.2Mbps in downlink. HSDPA achieves the increase in data transfer speeds by defining a new W-CDMA or TD-CDMA channel and is an evolutionary improvement for the UMTS standard.

Neil Laider, VP of Orange Business Services, said: "Mobile broadband is designed to increase the productivity of our customers, wherever they happen to be working. 3G+ provides faster response times and enhances applications where bigger file downloads or faster data streaming is required.?

"For example, a 3MB PowerPoint presentation will typically take just 34 seconds to download using Orange 3G+ compared with 20 minutes via GPRS. Customers with 3G+ enabled mobile office cards will notice these benefits as 3G+ is rolled out across the network. Orange is future proofing by ensuring all mobile office cards are 3G+ ready."

Orange has been expected to make this announcement for quite some time, as most mobile operators have already upgraded their networks.