Cingular Confirms Closure of TDMA Network

Speaking at the TelecomNext conference, Cingular's CEO Stan Sigman says that the company plans to finalise the migration of its customers to the GSM platform and shut down its legacy TDMA network in 2008. He said that over 95% of voice traffic is now carried by the company's GSM network. Cingular has been migrating its network to an all-GSM based platform since it aquired AT&T Wireless back in 2004, which at the time was a TDMA operator.

There may a certain irony in that while Cingular chose to "dump" the TDMA network when it brought ATTWS, it is now the Cingular brand name that is receive the same favour as the company is rebranded back to AT&T Wireless following AT&T's takeover of Cingular's parent companies.

According to The Mobile World, at the end of last year, Cingular had 46.7 million GSM customers and just under 7 million TDMA users. The company is also estimated to still have a few hundred thousand legacy analogue customers on their AMPS network."

Posted to the site on 27th March 2006