Faster 3G data service? Probably not so soon.

Dong Ngo from CNET's Crave blog reported on AT&T's plans to rollout 7.2 Mbps HSPA, or High Speed Packet Access 3G technology. According to him, the new speed will be available by the end of the year in six cities in the United States. While Ngo lamented that there is no time frame for the San Francisco Bay Area where he currently lives, I personally would not be so disappointed, knowing what I now do.

According to Barry Hill, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Stoke, Inc, a Santa Clara-based maker of carrier hardware, mobile phone providers are facing a "tsunami of data" as users plug in to mobile data networks en masse. I spoke with Hill during his stop-over in Singapore last week, where he explained the challenge mobile providers face as they attempt to scale existing infrastructure that was never designed to cope with so much data in the first place.

So while having 7.2 Mbps or even 14.4 Mbps HSPA access is fantastic, it will ultimately only be beneficial if backend infrastructure is ready to cope with the increased load.

For now, IT departments planning to create applications to leverage on mobile data might want to tweak their expectations if they plan to move huge amount of data traffic over the wireless mobile networks.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News

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