T-Mobile USA 3G

3G Upgrade

In September 2006, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) offered, at auction, licenses in the first Advanced Wireless Services band. This band was an area of wireless spectrum, half in the 1700MHz (1.7GHz) and half in the 2100 MHz (2.1GHz) frequencies, that was already in use by government services but would be available at some point in the future when those services moved to different frequencies.

The auction made numerous licenses available in overlapping market-area, economic-areas, and regional levels. Each license was individually bid upon, and T-Mobile was the winner in 120 license auctions, at an aggregate price of $4.18 billion. As part of its winnings, T-Mobile gained nationwide coverage of 1.7 GHz and 2.1 GHz, with numerous areas being supplemented with addition licenses. Examples include New York City, Chicago, and Boston where T-Mobile acquired one-third (33%) of the available spectrum, or San Francisco, Houston, and Miami where they acquired 45% of the available spectrum.

Two weeks after confirming their winning bids, on October 6, 2006, T-Mobile announced their intentions to create a UMTS third generation, or 3G, cellular network with the spectrum they had won. T-Mobile USA said it would utilize and build on the experience of T-Mobile Europe, which already implemented its own 3G network, and at roll-out they intend to offer 7.2 Mbit/s service, making it the fastest 3G network in the United States. The upgrade was forecast to cost $2.6 billion, in addition to the $4.12 billion spent to acquire the spectrum. T-Mobile, however, was unable to deliver on the promise of 7.2 Mbit/s HSDPA at launch. Currently, T-Mobile's 3G service caps out at 1.8 Mbit/s, half the top speed of AT&T's 3.6 Mbit/s HSDPA network.

During the Oct 6 announcement, T-Mobile indicated they had already begun to deploy AbOUT half of the upgraded equipment, beginning in major markets such as New York City. With the equipment in place, they would be able to activate their network as soon as the current users, various government services, vacated these frequencies. T-Mobile had hoped to have its network activated by mid-2007, but as of September 2007 the government users had not vacated the AWS band. As of January 2009 there is 27 markets online, they are listed below.

Top 27 Markets

• New York City
• Austin, Texas
• New Jersey and Long Island
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Miami, Florida
• Dallas, Texas
• Chicago
• Houston, Texas
• Philadelphia
• Denver, Colorado
• Detroit, Michigan
• Orlando, Florida
• Kansas City, Missouri
• Atlanta, Georgia
• Los Angeles, California
• New England
• Portland, Oregon
• Sacramento, California
• San Diego, California
• Seattle, Washington
• Washington, D.C.
• San Francisco, California
• Birmingham, Alabama
• Memphis, Tennessee
• Tampa, Florida
• Phoenix, Arizona

3G Handsets

• T-Mobile G1
• Sony Ericsson TM506
• Samsung Behold
• Samsung T819