Vodafone announced today the commercial launch of its Mobile Broadband offering, supported by Ericsson's HSDPA solution. HSDPA will be available first in the German cities Hanover, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Munich and eventually throughout the entire WCDMA network, which today covers more than 70 percent of the population. Vodafone will promote HSDPA as "UMTS Broadband" to their German customers.

Hartmut Kremling, CTO, Vodafone in Germany says: "With UMTS Broadband, i.e. HSDPA, 3G moves to the fast track. Together with Ericsson we will push the fast roll-out in our 3G net accordingly."

Ericsson's mobile broadband solution HSDPA not only provides high data throughput rates comparable to wireline broadband access over DSL technology, it is also offering more than twice the effective capacity of WCDMA and dramatically shortening response times for interactive services, drastically improving the end user's experience.

In addition to the commercial launch at CeBIT, Vodafone is demonstrating the second phase of Mobile Broadband with up to 10 Mbit/s over Ericsson's HSDPA as well as Ericsson's HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access) with up to 1.5 Mbit/s. HSDPA and HSUPA enable Mobile Broadband services comparable to services over DSL.

Ericsson is shaping the future of Mobile and Broadband Internet communications through its continuous technology leadership. Providing innovative solutions in more than 140 countries, Ericsson is helping to create the most powerful communication companies in the world.