LAS VEGAS—AT&T will have all of its 3G markets enabled with the high speed uplink capabilities by the middle of the year, according to Hank Kafka, vice president of network architecture for the operator.

AT&T had 255 major metropolitan markets with W-CDMA/HSDPA at the end of 2007 and continues to add markets. Kafka said at a GSM Association roundtable on HSPA that AT&T expects to cover 350 markets with 3G by the end of 2008, including all of the top 100 markets.

The operator started installing HSUPA last year and now is in the process of rolling it out, he said. By mid-year, he said all of its 3G markets will have HSUPA. He says typical data rates on the downlink now are between 600-to-1400 Kbps with a peak of 3.6 Mbps, while the downlink typically is 500-to-800 Kbps.

There are upgrades for HSPA which take it as high as 14.4 Mbps and Kafka says AT&T is studying those. But he declined to say when or if AT&T will raise its data rates to those levels.

Kafka also said AT&T has seen significant data usage increases for customers using 3G.