In a bid to further tap into the current surge in the mobile broadband market plan for the manufacture of its own 3G USB dongles have been announce by the mobile phone manufacturer Nokia.

According to the vice president for hardware platform components at Nokia, Tapio Markki, early 2009 will see Nokia shipping its first internet sticks, with aims to benefit from its experience and know-how in 3G technology development.

Markki said “Leveraging these capabilities, we believe we are well-positioned to become one of the winning providers for HSPA modem solutions. The market for HSPA modems is expected to grow very rapidly during the coming years.”

Although Ovation supply models for Vodafone and O2 the main manufacturer of the vast majority of USB mobile broadband dongles to phone networks throughout the UK is just one company - Huawei
The price of the mobile broadband dongle was something that Nokia was not willing to comment on although it said the devices would be mostly bundled with services or sold through operators.

The expectation for mobile broadband dongles in the global market may grow from 20 million this year and 26 million next year including PC cards and external USB modems according to Strategy Analytics.

Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics said “In particular European operators, such as Vodafone, are aggressively promoting and subsidising dongles right now, because they are seen as a secondary device that provides additional revenues for carriers beyond a traditional handset.”

The announcement that it had developed an embedded 3G module for laptops in the latter part of 2006 and that an agreement to sell it as part of its next-generation Centrino Duo mobile technology platform had been made with Intel, which was the first attempt Nokia had made to get into the business of connecting laptops over wireless networks. Unfortunately a joint decision to end co-operation on the connectivity module was made in early 2007 by Intel and Nokia.