Among large national carriers, T-Mobile was a little late to the 3G mobile broadband party. They now appear to be trying to make up for lost time.
They’ve selected HSPA+ technology for their push into 3G, and are now aggressively trying to build out a national footprint with it. T-Mobile’s goal is to reach 185 million people in 100 markets by the end of 2010. They recently added nine more markets — Boston; Erie, Pennsylvania; Fresno, California; Palm Springs, California; San Diego; Miami; Richmond, Virginia; Spokane, Washington; and Topeka, Kansas – bringing the current total to 55 markets.
T-Mobile is also flexing their HSPA+ muscle, telling Light Reading they intend to open the broadband spigot for the service, and sometime in 2011 offer theoretical downstream speeds of 42 Mb/s in some markets. The keyword of course is ‘theoretical.’ Average speeds will be probably be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of theoretical. But even with that, you’re looking at a range of 14 Mb/s to 21 Mb/s for a wireless offer, which already trumps 4G offers from Clearwire/Sprint and probably Verizon’s pending LTE service, not to mention a lot of wireline broadband offers.
Speaking of 4G, T-Mobile is the last remaining national carrier not to reveal a 4G roadmap. There was some recent speculation that they T-Mobile may join the Clearwire alliance, which currently consists of Sprint and cable company partners, including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, but nothing firm on that yet.
