The company says it has invited "a select group of [40] business customers who live or work on the Lower North Shore [of Sydney] to participate in the trial" as a precursor to the first commercial launch HSDPA in Australia. This limited trial is via HSDPA data cards only, not handsets. It offers downstream speeds up to 1.8Mps.

Vodafone says it will launch a commercial HSDPA service in the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas before the end of 2006 and expand it progressively to the rest of the network.

Optus, which shares the same 3G network with Vodafone, has given little indication of its HSPDA plans. When queried, a spokeswoman told iTWire only that: "we have trialled HSDPA successfully in our laboratories and will be trialling it more widely in the coming months."

At its annual results presentation last month, Hutchison Australia said it expected to have HSDPA available in many parts of the network by the end of the year, and across the entire network by the end of the first quarter of 2007. Initially it will enable download speeds of over 1Mbps and by year end "maximum theoretical download speeds of 14Mbps...subject to handset availability."

The Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) says that 117 HSDPA networks have been deployed in 54 countries, 52 offering commercial services, since The first HSDPA network entered service last October. GSA estimates that by end December 2006 there will be 80 HSDPA networks in commercial service.

Also, the GSA announced last month the results of a survey showing that, in total, there are more than 50 HSDPA-enabled devices on the market from 16 suppliers, double the number five months ago. Sixteen of these are capable of operation at 850MHz, the frequency of Telstra's CDMA replacement network.

The total of 50 does not include the many models of notebooks/laptops with embedded HSDPA modules and PC data cards enabling wireless wide area networking access which have been launched by several PC manufacturers, mostly in partnership with mobile network operators.

The survey found: 25 PC data cards (PCMCIA and ExpressCard); three USB modems; three broadband wireless routers, and 19 mobile phones.