AT&T will launch 3G service next week in San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix and Detroit, reports Reuters. The company will offer the data service at a fixed all-you-can-use rate of about $25 a month to consumers and $80 a month to corporate customers, sources say.
Cingular Wireless plans to buy AT&T Wireless for $41 billion. The deal, which it expects to close in October, will make it the biggest U.S. mobile operator. Cingular hopes to begin upgrading their combined network for high-speed (3g) services in 2005.
AT&T Wireless says its W-CDMA tests show that the technology can support Internet data at speeds of about 200-300 kbps.
The competing EV-DO standard will be used by both Verizon’s national EV-DO network (BroadbandAccess), and Sprint’s national EV-DO network. That technology is said to deliver 300-500kbps (Data Only).
Cingular will begin a UMTS trial in their home town of Atlanta, Georgia this summer, but a wide rollout won’t occur until 2006 according to CEO Stan Sigman. That’s not counting AT&T’s four city 3G launch, announced earlier by AT&T. “UMTS is something that we couldn t plan for commercially without the spectrum that our merger will give us” [the pending acquisition of AT&T Wireless], Sigman told a Lehman crowd last month.
Initially the Cingular 3G network will only be available to employees, who will be limited to data-use via a Lucent’s Merlin U530 UMTS PCMCIA card. Cingular, like AT&T, will use the 1900 mHz band for 3G trials, while reserving some for 2G users. They’re trying to shift the bulk of 2/2.5 G usage to their 850 mHz spectrum, according to The Feature.
Earlier, AT&T Wireless announced they would commercially launch UMTS in four US cities by the end of the year. AT&T never announced when it expected to roll UMTS out nationwide and now Cingular CEO Stan Sigman doesn’t expect a broad rollout until 2006 on the combined network, despite whatever work AT&T has completed. Sigman said the supply of equipment simply doesn’t meet their demand yet. AT&T is using base stations from both Ericsson and Nortel, but the new Cingular 3G system will not.
An interim data-only standard, EDGE is currently being offered nation-wide by AT&T for $79/month. It delivers 60-120Kbps. 3G Americas announced today that more than 100 operators in 63 countries are in various stages of readiness for EDGE high-speed wireless data technology to provide wireless customers with an array of next generation services and applications.
Both GSM’s (W-CDMA) and CDMA’s (EV-DO) are moving targets. Ugrades to both “3G” standards are planned for cellular VoIP.
Cingular Wireless recently issued an RFP for an UMTS/HSDPA infrastructure, which it plans to deploy across its network. The carrier is testing UMTS in its home market of Atlanta using Lucent gear; the HSDPA component involves a software upgrade to the UMTS equipment to support data speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps downstream.
HSDPA provides speeds of 384 kbps upstream, which is still limited but will support VoIP. Another UMTS uplink solution in development, called enhanced uplink data channel (EUDCH), could give GSM operators 4 Mbps in both directions, making it very compatible with VoIP.
Still, Cingular’s deployment of UMTS and HSDPA technologies doesn’t necessarily mean it will automatically migrate to VoIP, according to Kris Rinne, acting chief technical officer of Cingular Wireless.
On the CDMA side, 1XEV-DO Rev. A has an uplink speed of 1.8 Mbps with 3.1 Mbps downstream, making it possible to send voice packets with header information over Rev. A and not cause degradation of voice quality. Although no U.S. CDMA carrier has announced that it was testing or planning to migrate to Rev. A, Verizon Wireless Chief Technical Officer Dick Lynch said at CTIA Wireless 2004 that it was possible the company would continue on its EV-DO path and perhaps at some point offer a type of voice service over EV-DO.
DV (Data + Voice) equipment is not expected to be available until 2006. Although 1XEV-DV offers both a voice and data component, the voice portion of EV-DV is circuit switched. According to Peter Jarich, senior analyst, wireless infrastructure at Current Analysis, EV-DO Rev. A gives DO more potential as a voice network. “It’s too early to say, but DO does seem more compelling,” Jarich says.
DailyWireless overviews developments on Cellular At The Races and 4G Goes Ballistic.
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