Although the rumors of this network upgrade have been lurking around the blogosphere for some time now (at least since July of this year), Bell and Telus have made the announcement official. With the emergence of handsets and applications that leverage these higher bandwidth capabilities on the rise, the convergence of multimedia, phone, wallet and mobile productivity is near. What does this network upgrade mean to you…HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) would provide consumers with up to 7mbps on a GSM network and slightly less than that on CDMA networks (with potentially higher speeds in the future). All this speed means that the differing wireless technologies are on a course to convergence where cellular and wireless meet (see attached pic).

Having said all of this, with these upgrades costing an estimated $750M to $1B don’t expect to see your system access fee to go away anytime soon (this in conjunction with Rogers investment of just under $1B CAD).