Cingular today at CES demonstrated a faster version of its new high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) network, performing a data call with a new PC card capable of 3.6 Mb/s downstream speeds.

Though still far from capitalizing HSDPA’s theoretical ceiling of 14.4 Mb/s, the demonstration signaled that Cingular may move up through the iterations of HSDPA faster than expected. Cingular’s UMTS/HSDPA network infrastructure--now launched in 15 markets--already supports full HSDPA speeds, but handset chipset technology is much further down the curve. The HSDPA standard calls for more than a dozen phases, each supporting greater speeds. Cingular’s originally launched laptop cards that supported 1.8 Mb/s theoretical downlink speeds, though real-world speeds are more in line with 400 kb/s to 700 kb/s. But today Cingular took the wraps off an Option Wireless PC modem card embedded with Qualcomm’s new MSM6280 chipset, which quadruples the current capacity the network can handle.

Qualcomm began sampling the new chipset in October and expects to ship the silicon commercially this year. The chip actually has a theoretical capacity of 7.2 Mb/s, but Qualcomm said it has been able to achieve controlled bursts of 3.6 Mb/s in the lab. When Cingular does commercially launch the new data card, however, customers shouldn’t expect that kind of performance over their own laptops. While capable of boosting individual performance over individual devices, Cingular is aiming to use the evolving technologies to boost overall network performance, dividing that capacity over more users per cellular carrier.