Western Wireless to Overlay with GSM

T-Mobile USA has signed a national roaming agreement Western Wireless Corp. and has also Cingular Wireless agreed to expand the roaming arrangement reached with Cingular Wireless last year, and to extend it until 2006.

For T-Mobile's customers, the roaming agreement with Western Wireless expands GSM/GPRS voice and data service along more than 5,500 highway miles and across much of the Western United States including Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas; New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Iowa. With these and T-Mobile's other existing agreements, T-Mobile's GSM/GPRS 1900 network will reach approximately 253 million people.

Under the agreement with Western Wireless, Western Wireless will build a GSM/GPRS 1900 network to cover approximately 4 million people using existing 850 MHz spectrum as well as new 1900 MHz spectrum to be purchased from T-Mobile, subject to regulatory approvals. Western Wireless expects to add GSM/GPRS to one-half of its existing cell sites by mid-2004, leveraging its existing network infrastructure to provide a cost effective solution with extensive coverage to its roaming partners.

T-Mobile also agreed with Cingular Wireless to expand the roaming deal reached by the companies last year, specifically to include advanced data services and expanded highway coverage, and to extend it until 2006. Cingular Wireless is a joint venture between SBC Communications (NYSE - SBC) and BellSouth (NYSE - BLS).

Financial terms of the agreements were not disclosed. Western Wireless expects to begin offering GSM service by the end of the third quarter of 2003.

This is a sort of homecoming for Western Wireless as back in May 1999, Western Wireless spun off of its 80.1% ownership of VoiceStream, the GSM network later purchased by T-Mobile. Western Wireless currently operates a network based on both TDMA and CDMA."

Posted to the site on 5th May 2003