Editor's Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We've gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.

The global mobile industry is about to reach a major inflection point: Mobile broadband is on the verge of making the transition from a premium service for the affluent to a mass-market service.

Two powerful forces are driving this transition. The first is this: The rapidly falling cost of devices that can connect to HSPA networks, which have been deployed by more than 280 mobile operators worldwide to provide mobile broadband services to their customers.

Prices are now low enough that HSPA phones are crossing the divide between the postpaid market, where the retail price of handsets is often heavily subsidized by mobile operators, and the prepaid market, where subsidies tend to be small or non-existent. This is an important step because more than 70% of the world's 4 billion plus mobile users have prepaid subscriptions and have to pay the full retail price for their access device.

In the Philippines, for example, Smart sells the Buddy Zip 188 handset in a prepaid kit for just 3,790 pesos ($80), while in the U.K., Brits can now buy an HSPA handset, the INQ Mini 3G, for only £40 ($67) on a prepaid subscription. Significantly, the INQ handset is sold with integrated Facebook and Twitter clients, pointing to the second major force that is turning mobile broadband into a mass-market phenomena in western Europe, North America and other developed markets: demand for continuous – which means mobile – access to social networking services.

In Japan, a technology trendsetter, usage of social networking on mobile networks is already far ahead of social networking usage via fixed lines. For example, mobile usage of Mixi, Japan's leading social networking service, is three times desktop PC usage, according to research by Morgan Stanley.

Although people use HSPA connectivity for a wide variety of purposes, such as video and music downloads, Web surfing, exchanging slide presentations and transmitting medical scans, social networking may be the closest thing there is to a killer application for HSPA. Social networking is undoubtedly one of the most successful Web services that exist today: Facebook, the largest social network, claims more than 300 million active users worldwide.

But social networking tends to be even more fun, compelling and productive if friends and colleagues can share experiences as they happen. Software developers can use their smartphones to tweet text and photos in real time as Steve Jobs unveils a hot new Apple gizmo on stage, music lovers with cameraphones can upload photos live from the Glastonbury Festival and clubbers on a night out can swap intelligence on the hottest Manhattan venues.

To do all of these things, people need fast and reliable mobile connections and that generally means they need HSPA: Second-generation networks and handsets, for all their virtues, simply weren't designed for the real-time, multimedia world of social networking.

So, a combination of lower device prices and demand for mobile social networking is set to drive rapid growth in HSPA uptake over the next few years. We are already seeing a surge. The number of new HSPA connections worldwide has lept to nine million a month from five-and-a-half million a year ago, according to Wireless Intelligence. It forecasts that, by 2013, there will be more than one billion HSPA connections worldwide.

In the third quarter of 2009, global W-CDMA (the radio access technology used by HSPA) handset shipments rose 15% year-on-year to 68 million, even as the overall mobile phone market shrank 7% to 268 million, according to Nokia. Some equipment manufacturers are anticipating that the market will swing definitively in favour of 3G next year. Qualcomm expects 3G handset shipments to exceed GSM shipments for the first time in 2010.

As well as being pulled by consumer demand, 3G devices are also being pushed into the market by mobile operators looking to move more traffic on to highly efficient HSPA networks and boost data revenues. In Europe, 74% of all operator subsidies will be focused on HSPA devices in 2009, compared with just 14% in 2007, according to figures from market research firm Gfk. For mobile operators, a subscriber with a fast HSPA connection and a smartphone is far more likely to sign up for a dedicated data tariff plan, generating additional revenue, than his or her counterpart with a 2G handset.

Even without the subsidies, mounting competition in the smartphone market is putting pressure on prices and manufacturers are likely to roll out of a wide range of highly affordable smartphones in 2010 to the benefit of both consumers and operators. Many people will probably buy these rich handsets because of their large, high-resolution screens and support for social networks, but they will also visit associated application stores and begin experimenting with other mobile data services.

With these powerful forces in play, it is not difficult to see why Wireless Intelligence is forecasting the number of HSPA users worldwide will top 340 million by the end of 2010. A combination of falling device prices and demand for mobile social networking, a highly viral service, means that figure may even be conservative. Mobile broadband has come of age.

Dan Warren joined the GSM Association (GSMA) in 2007 as Director of Technology with a particular focus on helping the Association drive forward standards and technologies including High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) mobile broadband, Long Term Evolution (LTE) standards and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as well as providing internal technical consultancy to GSMA's Projects and Working Groups. Prior to joining the GSMA, Dan worked for Vodafone and Nortel. Dan has a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Applied Mathematics.

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