T-Mobile USA, expanding its 3G network to reach more of its customer base, said it will effectively double the number of markets covered with UMTS/HSDPA by the end of the year. The company currently has UMTS/HSDPA commercially available in 13 major metropolitan markets. It will have another eight up and running by mid-October and and additional six markets online by year's end. The announced deployments will bring the number of T-Mobile markets served by 3G to 27. With the expansion, more than two-thirds of the company's current data subscribers will have access to the new networks. The company plans to continue expansion to more customers and markets through 2009.
T-Mobile launched its much-delayed 3G network in May of this year, and as it works urgently to bring these new markets online, it intends to use what it calls "new and compelling" data-centric, all-in-one devices to attract new customers to its HSDPA network. Currently, T-Mobile's 3G customers have access to a number of UMTS handsets as well as the HSDPA-enabled Sony Ericsson TM506. One of the new devices to watch for, which T-Mobile is expected to announce on Tuesday this week, is the HTC Dream, the first commercial device based on the Google Android operating system. Clearly, T-Mobile hopes to create some buzz with this device. It has said that the Android device will hit the market in mid-October, which not-so-coincidentally is when the next round of cities will have its 3G services.
Separately, T-Mobile's parent company in Germany announced that it had conducted successful tests of the "4G" technology called LTE in partnership with Nortel Networks. The partners claim to have maintained a LTE mobile connection and data rates of up to 170 Mbps on the download, and up to 50 Mbps for uploads, while driving in a car at highway speeds and transferring connections between different cell sites.
For more:
- read the release about T-Mobile USA's network expansion
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