Heavyweights from the mobile telephony industry combined today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to plea with world governments to allocate more spectrum to mobile data services, Mobility reports this week.

More spectrum, it was argued, would allow the mobile industry to play its part in generating growth that might pull the world economy out of the doldrums.

Rob Conway, CEO of industry group GSMA predicted that infrastructure spending and not housing will pull the world economy out of recession.

Conway cited studies suggesting that a ten per cent rise in mobile penetration equals a 0.6 per cent rise in a nation's gross domestic product.

Carl-Henric Svanberg, CEO of equipment manufacturer Ericsson said every dollar spent on broadband has a tenfold payback for society.

"Mobile broadband should be seen as infrastructure - like highways and utilities," he said.

Conway applauded the US$7.2 billion allocated by U.S. President Obama for broadband development in the United States, which in turn is dwarfed by the US$59 billion allocated by the Chinese Government to network China with 3G broadband.

"Governments are turning to the mobile industry for economic growth," he told the conference. "We are among the few sectors not asking for a bailout."

But the future of mobile telecommunications, he said, relies on migration to Long Term Evolution (4G) - a technology that requires more mobile spectrum. "We will be out of future capacity without new spectrum," he said.

Conway urged Governments to give mobile networks are bigger share of the 'digital dividend' - that wireless spectrum available for reallocation once broadcasters move from analogue to digital.

"We are only asking 25 per cent of the 400MHz that will become available," he said. "Using that spectrum for wireless is a bigger boost for the world economy than a few new TV channels."

Carriers also warned governments not to be too greedy when it comes to allocating new spectrum. Telenor president and CEO Job Fredrik Baksaas said Europe's 3G auctions "took the heat out of the [mobile industry's] investment capacity."

There is a danger that the spectrum required for LTE might be allocated in the same way, he said.

"Additional spectrum is not a luxury but an absolute necessity," said GSMA chairman Alexander Izosimov.

"Many people in Government may be tempted to repeat what happened with 3G auctions. They need to pay for all these stimulus packages and they know where to get it."

But such an approach, he said, "will suck up all the resources for investment. That will have reparations across the whole value chain."

Beyond spectrum allocation, Telecom Italia CEO Franco Bernabe called for less regulation and lower taxes to aid the mobile industry.

"We are not asking for subsidisation," he said. "We need lighter regulation." "The demand is there [for mobile services], and our willingness to invest is there. We don't need help from the Government, but freedom to act."

He presented a forecast of the broadband world in 2014 that showed 3.5 billion high-speed access lines globally, about 80 percent of which would be via wireless, rather than fixed, connections.

Of those 3 billion projected mobile broadband lines, about 70 percent will be HSPA, forecasts Ericsson, which, of course, hopes to be able to reap the rewards of its HSPA investments for many years to come.

LTE, which, while having a theoretical peak downlink data speed of 173 Mbit/s, is set to deliver real-world, average downlink data rates of 34 Mbit/s and uplinks of about 7.3 Mbit/s, will account for less than 10 percent, even though shipments and deployment are expected to kick in next year. (See TeliaSonera: We'll Do 4G in 2010, Verizon to Name LTE Vendors at MWC and AT&T & Verizon to Use 700 MHz for 4G .)

That's because LTE deployments will begin at different times for different types of carriers, said Svanberg, in response to questions from Light Reading. He noted that many of the early LTE adopters are likely to be those operators that are currently using a 2G or 3G network technology, such as CDMA, that doesn't provide a migration to LTE via HSPA, and operators that have deployed 3G networks using platforms that are not easy to migrate to LTE and true 4G technologies.

Alongside those operators, many carriers that are deploying HSPA now will be able to deploy a number of evolutions of the technology, which will, in theory, ultimately deliver downlink speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s.

The Ericsson CEO, who stated last month that the global economic downturn had yet to impact Ericsson's business, noted that although GSM was introduced in the early 1990s, his company reported its record year of GSM shipments in 2008, "so maybe we will have our record year of HSPA shipments in 2020. LTE and HSPA will co-exist," he stated – and he's not alone in that view. (See Ericsson Soars on Strong Q4, Outlook and 3G vs LTE: No Contest.)

And the Swedish giant is showing off its latest HSPA developments here in Barcelona, with a demonstration of the 21 Mbit/s downlink version that has already been deployed by Telstra Corp. (Pink Sheets: TLSYY) in Australia, the 28 Mbit/s HSPA solution that uses MIMO, and even a 42 Mbit/s version, though commercial availability timetables for the latter two speeds haven't yet been made available. (See Ericsson Pumps Up HSPA and Telstra Pushes HSPA Limits.)

But questions remain about how easy, and economic, it will be for carriers to migrate to LTE. Although it is widely accepted that the shift from 3G to LTE won't be as painful as the move from 2G to 3G, Ericsson won't say when it believes LTE will be a stable technology with plenty of device choice and wide availability: One of the major hold-ups for 3G was a lack of devices for customers to use.

Ericsson's head of networks, Johan Wibergh, did tell Light Reading, though, that the introduction of LTE is set to be much quicker and easier than with 3G, as network migration will mainly involve upgrades to existing deployed chassis and LTE services will likely begin mostly with dongles and integrated units on laptops rather than on brand new, yet-to-be-developed handset terminals.

Quicker, then, means anything less than about 8 years.

Paolo Pescatore, director of operator strategy at consultancy at CCS Insight , believes there are a number of variables that will impact the speed of carrier uptake and rollout of LTE. He says there are very few LTE orders yet, and that he doesn't expect to see many until operators have upgraded from 14 Mbit/s HSPA to the 28 Mbit/s version.

While Pescatore agrees with Wibergh that dongles and integrated modules will be the initial devices for LTE, and that their introduction will be easier than with 3G phones, he notes that it's hard to tell whether the current exponential growth in data service usage that's set to drive the requirement for LTE rollouts will be maintained during a period of economic uncertainty, and that there's still a great deal of uncertainty about the availability of the spectrum required for LTE.

In addition, the so-called Digital Dividend spectrum that many operators are hoping will be made available to them for future mobile data services could be put to other uses, notes the CCS Insight man.

— Ray Le Maistre, International News Editor, Light Reading