"3G doesn't give us true broadband," said Peter Newcombe, president of Nortel Networks' carrier networks division for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at the Broadband World Forum held in Paris late last year.

Newcombe defined true broadband as speeds at which users can't tell whether the content and applications they're using are stored locally in their device or on a far-off server. These speeds will be provided by technologies such as WiMax, LTE (long-term evolution), and a flavor of CDMA known as Ref C, he said.

Newcombe's views were echoed by Eric Hamilton, CTO of Sydney-based WiMax provider, Unwired, who said that while cellular carriers may attempt to match the price and performance of wireless broadband Internet using voice-based technology, the reality is, there are limitations.

"The uplink capability in HSDPA is no different to 3G, so while the carriers can talk about high speed downloads, uploads are shackled," he explained. "A true broadband customer uploads approximately about one half of the bytes that he/she downloads, and the total traffic is in the region of 1.5GBs per month. An HSDPA solution will not cope with any reasonable number of customers acting this way."

A neck-and-neck call