T-Mobile Expanding German HSDPA Coverage

T-Mobile Germany says that it plans to offer HSDPA coverage at the upcoming CeBIT 2006 consumer and trade fair in Hanover. T-Mobile will offer transmission rates of up to 1.8 Mbit/s and uplink speeds of 384 Kbit/s in large parts of the UMTS network. Selected T-Mobile business customers, among them the national rail network, Deutsche Bahn have already been testing the T-Mobile high-speed UMTS network at several locations since the beginning of October.

HSDPA will also be available from summer 2006 in areas where T-Mobile Germany already offers UMTS coverage. T-Mobile will gradually increase the transmission speed of high-speed UMTS to 7.2 Mbit/s during further development phases. 3.6 Mbit/s should be possible by the end of the year.

As part of its integrated broadband network strategy, T-Mobile will offer its customers a solution from CeBIT onwards that will enable them to switch seamlessly from W-LAN to GPRS, UMTS or high-speed UMTS without interrupting the existing online connection.

Aside from expanding the high-speed UMTS network, T-Mobile is also pressing ahead with the development of HSDPA-capable hardware. Fujitsu Siemens and T-Mobile are expected to launch the first notebooks with built-in HSDPA, UMTS and W-LAN technology in the second quarter of 2006. They do away with the need for an external card for mobile data communication and are based on the LIFEBOOK series of business computers from Fujitsu Siemens."

Posted to the site on 6th February 2006