Is HSUPA Stalling?

I've been looking at some of the data on HSUPA deployments, and frankly it's a bit disappointing. There was a news article yesterday quoting Qualcomm (QCOM) saying "This is the year for HSUPA" and "it's now being included as standard for chipsets aimed at 'mid range' devices and by the end of the year will appear as standard on low end phones as well".

To me, that last comment rang alarm bells - it sounds like a marketing pitch "Hey, everyone! HSUPA's the next must-have! Get involved! No, really, everyone's gonna be doing it! Honest....."

Normally that sort of pitch is made when something isn't happening. "Standard on low end phones"...er, well given that WCDMA still isn't standard on low-end devices, I'd be pretty surprised if the world's $30 handsets suddenly skipped straight over HSDPA and went all the way to full HSUPA from GSM.

In fact, there's still a real dearth of HSUPA phones. Although there are 60-odd devices in total, most are modems, dongles, modules & other non-phone products. There's a handful of Toshiba (TOSBF.PK) phones in Japan, and some high-end Windows devices from HTC, I-Mate and a couple of other vendors. There are no high-end Nokias (NOK) with high-speed uplink yet (including the new N96), the Apple (AAPL) iPhone is HSDPA not HSUPA and so on.

So clearly, there's some level of desperate hyperbole.... but the question is how much? Looking at the GSA's statistics for deployments and "commitments", it seems that the wheels have come off the "Uplink" bandwagon a bit. While 51 HSUPA networks have launched, there's only another 17 known to be "committed". Yes, the number of live networks has almost doubled in 6 months, but the future roll out schedule hasn't kept pace. Looking back at some statistics for HSDPA from 2006, when it reached 50 deployments, there was a pipeline of 60+ on the way.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of HSUPA. It's one of the things that makes VoIPo3G much more practical. But I suspect that it's that, coupled with the risks of P2P traffic or people running PCs as web servers over the mobile network, that are leading operators to avoid specifying UPA as a must-have. They'd rather have faster generations of HSDPA, or support for different frequency bands like 900MHz.

Despite some of the blather about social networking, there isn't really a killer revenue-generating app for HSUPA services outside of a few road warriors and photographers needing to upload big image & presentation files from PCs. I'm not convinced operators really want to host billions of uncompressed 5MP cameraphone images on their networks, even if the radio network can support it.

I have a suspicion that most operators will probably wait for HSPA+ / HSPA-Evolved before upgrading their uplink, particular for handset users. There will be a slow creep of HSUPA into 3G dongle modems for those markets where shipments have exploded, and you'll start see smartphones gradually coming into the market at end-2008, but you can forget about truly massmarket HSUPA phones until late 2009 or early 2010.