Boy, we’ve come a pretty long way from giving you guys basic updates on what cities are getting T-Mobile 3G, haven’t we? For 2010, T-Mobile is stepping up and announcing that it will soon be delivering HSPA+ to cities in the East & West Cost. Meaning 21 Mbps this year is going to be last years 7.2 Mbps. GigaOM sat down with T-Mobile and got them to explain the meaning of HSPA+ to T-Mobile and how soon we will see 21Mbps. Here’s the juicy parts:
- T-Mobile has already upgraded the existing HSPA software in “major cities” along the California Coast and said “major cities from Washington, D.C. to Boston” will have it on the East Coast, including Philadelphia, where it’s already live.
- T-Mobile has deployed fiber to 7 percent of its towers with 20 Mbps of capacity on those fiber strands. He also said that within the next few weeks the operator will turn on fiber to about 25 percent of its towers.
So basically, the towers on the coast are HSPA+ ready but the backhaul needs to be improved for devices to eventually take advantage of it. T-Mobile believes that their stance with HSPA+ (which is like 3.5G) is better compared to their competitors’ stance on LTE (4G) because T-Mobile will be able to get HSPA+ rolling this year while it may take AT&T & Verizon until 2011 or 2012 to get things ready. Plus 3.5G is plenty fast.
But even though we can’t wait for devices to take advantage of the 21Mbps network, we’re still sure some of you guys are without even regular T-Mobile 3G. Let us know which cities don’t have T-Mobile 3G in the comments!
[via gigaom]