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By RICHARD MULLINS, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 16, 2007

Next week, customers of AT&T wireless may notice their cell phones have a little more zip when sending messages.

Tampa Bay will be among the first few markets where No. 1 U.S. carrier AT&T will nearly double the speed that their phones can upload photos, e-mail, text messages and video. The boost allows AT&T to roughly catch up with its two primary rivals, Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Wireless, which have made similar speed upgrades in the Tampa Bay area recently.

'A few years ago, the downlink speed was all that mattered,' said Richard Burns, AT&T's national president of network services for wireless. 'Now, everyone has cameras built into their phones, everyone on the planet is a kind of news reporter, and they're uploading video to places like YouTube and MySpace.'

AT&T's upload speeds will rise from between 300 to 500 kilobits per second to between 500 and 800 kilobits. Typically, sending a camera phone photo takes about 20 seconds, so that could cut that time in half. There are many variables (coverage, message type, signal strength) in theory, but AT&T's system would roughly match Sprint and Verizon Wireless. So-called 'peak' speeds can be higher with each wireless system, and are more variable. Sprint, for instance, has a system that can peak at 1.8 megabits-per-second, about twice the speed AT&T will offer. Verizon officials say their system can peak at 2.1 Mbps upload.

Since acquiring Cingular, AT&T is the nation's largest cell phone service provider with 63 million wireless customers. Over the past few years, AT&T has poured about $15 billion into upgrading its wireless network, Burns said, with much of it geared to helping enhance multimedia.

AT&T's own wireless flow of messages and Internet data doubled during 2006, and is up about 80 percent from January this year, Burns said.

Besides traditional voice calls, data increasingly make up an important part of the cellular phone market. Nationwide, text messaging nearly doubled during last year to 158 billion messages, according to the wireless association CTIA. Multimedia messages such as photos and video grew to 2.7 billion messages in 2006, more than doubling from the year before. That growth likely will continue 'significantly' this year, said Joe Farren, spokesman for the CTIA.

Meanwhile, the audience for those messages continues to grow. Seattle-based research firm M:Metrics estimates there are more than 42 million camera phones in use in the United States, more than twice the number in use in late 2005, and more than 95 million Americans own phones that provide text messaging.

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.

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