Ever the maverick, T-Mobile USA, the only major carrier in the U.S. without wireless broadband data services, said waiting to come to market with data services allowed it to sidestep all the mobile TV and music hype. The carrier announced plans to roll-out a nationwide UMTS network to enable user-generated content and social networking applications, which follow the Web 2.0 trend, like MySpace and YouTube. The company plans to spend nearly $2.7 billion on the network rollout, which will make use of the $4.2 billion worth of spectrum it won in the recent AWS auction.
T-Mobile USA CEO Robert Dotson even mentioned Apple's Leopard OS, which is sure to lead to leaping iPhone assumptions: "As can be seen with Apple's new Leopard operating system, the richness of e-mail communications is just beginning to discover elements beyond the printed word, moving to dynamic and personally tailored image-rich communications."
T-Mobile International's CEO Rene Obermann said: "We're looking at the area of user generated content... where we could leverage or basically mobilize the trends which we can see on websites such as MySpace, YouTube or others... as well as data managmernt scenarios and consumer mobile email. We want to leverage existing behavior... when it comes to mobile music and TV, I wouldn't consider them big revenue generators."
For more on T-Mobile's UMTS plans:
- see this article from the AP