T-Mobile’s First HSPA+ Phone Coming in September?
For those unaware, T-Mobile is in the process of rolling out their HSPA+ 3G network, this network upgrade already covers 25 markets and 75 million people in the US with plans to cover 185 million people by the end of the year. The main benefit of this network is that it will increase the speeds of all their current 3G devices, without the need for consumers to buy a new phone. With that said though, most of T-Mobile’s phones have the ability to download at up to 7.2mbps and with their HSPA+ network to have a theoretical peak download speed of 21mbps, they aren’t able to take full advantage of the new speeds.
Well, T-Mobile has just announced through a Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile USA’s parent company) spokesperson, that they will be launching an HSPA+ enabled smartphone developed by HTC this year in September to take full advantage of the new network peak speeds. Engadget actually believes that this September device could be the HTC Vision recently spied.
This news also comes right after a picture was taken at a T-Mobile manager’s meeting showed possible plans to increase their HSPA+ network to 42mbps before 2011. Now, a spokesperson for Deutsche Telekom wanted to clarify:
According to the Deutsche Telekom spokesman, the carrier has not made a decision on that. “T-Mobile USA has not decided yet if they will use the new 42 Mbps standard or maybe rollout LTE for the US,” he said in an emailed response. “This decision will be made at a later point of time after having considered all necessary aspects and the experiences made with both HSPA+ and LTE in the other markets of Deutsche Telekom.”
The reason being is that apparently the 42mbps HSPA+ upgrade would require new hardware on the cell towers just like a move to LTE would (and unlike the 21mbps upgrade that only required new software supposedly) so they are going to wait and see which makes more sense.
