T-Mobile on Wednesday introduced the HTC-made G2, the successor to the T-Mobile’s G1, and the first phone on the carrier to take advantage of T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network in the United States. T-Mobile’s teaser site said more details will be revealed in the coming weeks, perhaps around an HTC event on September 15.
The company announced the phone via a page on its Web site, but that page doesn’t give many hard details about the device. T-Mobile says its HSPA+ network, with backhaul in place, will cover 185 million people in the U.S. by the end of this year.
Technology Business Research analyst Ken Hyers expects that HSPA+ smartphones from T-Mobile will deliver average downloads of around 5 Mbit/s in city environments. The carrier is charging $59.99 for a maximum 5GB of downloads a month for those on contract, or $29.99 with a 200MB limit, using its Rocket 2.0 USB laptop stick.
T-Mobile USA isn’t planning to move to LTE for at least two years. The 21-Mbit/s HSPA+ upgrade is the fastest that the wireless technology can be cranked with software — rather than hardware — updates.
“We’ll get a fourth-generation wireless network either by buying spectrum or re-farming existing spectrum, or potentially leasing spectrum together with others,” CEO Rene Obermann said at a press conference on Aug. 5. “I don’t think we’ll trail others in the next two years.”
Since T-Mobile USA is virtually using all their spectrum assets for 2G and 3G, there is speculation that the carrier may lease spectrum from Clearwire for 4G service.
AT&T is also talking up their HSPA+ service. But AT&T’s backhaul upgrade is not as complete as T-Mobile’s. In addition, current iPhone 4 users will not be able to take advantage of HSPA+, since Apple does not yet support it. Apple isn’t believed to have an HSPA+ iPhone this year and may depend on having a sufficiently low-power Infineon chipset before it can make an attempt.
T-Mobile is the only major US wireless carrier, besides Cricket Wireless, to be using their AWS spectrum. Cricket is using CDMA Rev A for data networking.
