T-Mobile UK HSDPA Set To Speed Up With BT Backbone

With 3G in the UK finally taking off, it seems as though even fatter pipes are on their way to cater for our data-hungry needs.  BT and T-Mobile UK have just announced a partnership that will see the latter's base-stations around the country temporarily linked up by the former's leased-line service, before that's replaced by an ethernet-based service.  That means more bandwidth for data, mobile TV, music and video.

The combination of BT's 21CN (21st Century Network) and T-Mobile's investment in HSDPA cellular broadband (and technologies that build upon this) should see network speeds rising.  Services like Mobile TV, which are popular in the Far-East but are yet to make significant impact in Europe, will likely be the first to take advantage of the technology, with improving picture quality accompanying handsets with larger, higher-resolution displays.

T-Mobile is yet to announce when it will be introducing upgrades to its HSDPA network.

[via BT press release]