If you wanted to be online all the time with your notebook, there's a slew of firms ready to help you out.

According to Macworld UK, a consortium of companies including 3, Asus, Dell, Ericsson, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefonica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba and Vodafone are pushing for built-in support for mobile broadband.

The companies, which are working together, are currently pushing towards creating a new mark that will identify a notebook as ready to offer mobile Internet access. Such a mark will be backed by a US$1 billion marketing budget to be spent in the next year and be present on notebooks in time for the holiday shopping season.

"Together we are announcing the initiative to drive the adoption of mobile broadband notebooks," said Michael O'Hara, chief marketing officer at GSM Association (GSMA), which handles the initiative.

If a laptop bears the new mark, it supports at least 3.6 Mbps on paper and 1 Mbps in real-world capacity. The technical specification states that 3.6Mbps is required, and that 7.2Mbps is recommended, but the mark will always look the same. Different marks for different capacities won't be clear to customers, according to Ton Brand, who leads the initiative at the GSMA.

Per the deal, only members of the GSM family can get the mark, meaning HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) and LTE (Long Term Evolution)-using companies will be able to sport the logo. Though the WiMax standard is becoming prevalent, the standard currently lacks the coverage and mobility that operators and notebook manufacturers are looking for, according to the GSMA.

"About a year ago one of our customers talked at a telecom conference and one thing he highlighted was that the telecom industry does more or less everything it can to confuse its customers. We talk about 3G, Turbo 3G, HSPA and WCDMA, and that confuses the customers," said Eva Sparr, marketing director at Ericsson's mobile broadband modules unit.

The confusion needed to be addressed, and that is what the industry has done with its new mark, according to Sparr.

Currently, most mobile broadband users connect to the Internet using an external modem. Using an integrated module instead provides several advantages such as ease of use, better battery time and ease of location.

A second goal with the initiative is to offer an alternative to WiFi-based hotspots, and on a national level mobile broadband offers better convenience and pricing than hotspots, but more than a mark is needed if mobile broadband is to compete with WiFi hotspots on all levels.

"Cheaper international roaming is as important. If you price it out of the market it's never going to take off," said Christian Salbaing, managing director of 3 Group in Europe.

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