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All the talk of superphones and smartbooks at the Consumer Electronics Show must have the US carriers quaking in their boots at the impending strain on their networks. Both the major GSM operators came out with updates on their efforts to meet mobile data demand with capacity upgrades, though they admitted backhaul remains the real challenge.

AT&T greeted the new year by saying it had now completed the upgrade of its system to HSPA, almost two years ahead of its original schedule. However, it is only going for the 7.2Mbps version, while fellow cellcos round the world move towards 21Mbps HSPA+ and even, in Telstra of Australia's case, 42Mbps. Indeed, AT&T was pipped to the HSPA+ post before the holiday by a local Oregon cableco, BendBroadband, which became the first US firm to deploy the 21Mbps technology, using Ericsson gear to provide fixed access in its AWS spectrum.

The major challenge for AT&T this year will be to match the backhaul to the access network, to enable the peak download speeds. It is starting to convert T1 backhaul to fiber in key areas of mobile data bottleneck, and according to Telephony, it started deploying fiber-to-the-cell from last month in Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. It plans to do the same for most of its 3G network this year and to complete the migration by the end of 2011, hopefully with enough capacity in place also to support an LTE deployment from around 2012.

T-Mobile is quieter about its backhaul plans but faces the same problems of limited fiber availability for US cell sites. A spokesperson said there was an "aggressive roadmap" in place for 2010 to 2011 but would not elaborate further. However, the firm is looking to leapfrog AT&T on the RAN side, aiming for a national HSPA+ upgrade by the end of this year, delivering 21Mbps peak download speeds (in reality, these translate to averages of about 6Mbps, compared to 1Mbps or less for the older HSPA standards). But without fiber backhaul, or advanced microwave, the competitive advantage of TMo's HSPA+ would be negated.

Like AT&T, TMo has already completed the upgrade to 7.2Mbps, covering 200m pops. It claims to have had a smoother and cheaper upgrade path than AT&T, because it built out 3G so late, and therefore has the newest, HSPA-ready equipment (from Nokia Siemens and Ericsson).

It remains to be seen whether TMo will look beyond HSPA+ to the 42Mbps iteration, which uses MIMO smart antennas and dual carriers, before an eventual move to 4G (with an LTE build-out or a rumored tie-up with WiMAX-based Clearwire). It will be examining the experience of Telstra, which was the first operator in the world to deploy HSPA in 2006. The carrier has just scored another world first, testing HSPA+ Dual Carrier technology outside a vendor lab, on a closed portion of its Next G network, using equipment from Ericsson and Qualcomm's MDM8220 chipset. It hopes to deploy the technology by year end, less than two years after introducing 21Mbps HSPA+ from early 2009.

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