Poland's Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (trading as Era) says that it is the first operator in Poland to launch a HSDPA upgrade to its entire 3G network. PTC presented its application of the HSDPA technology for the first time in March of this year, at the Lodz Intertelecom trade fair. Six months later, PTC provides its clients with a fully functional HSDPA network; available within the limits of Era's current UMTS network.
Coverage of PTC's 3G HSDPA network includes 55 localities, including Warsaw, the Silesian region and the Gdansk agglomeration. Further plans include commercial launches of the same network in Szczecin, Torun, Bydgoszcz and Lublin. By the end of this year, over 8 million inhabitants of this country will find themselves within the range of the 3G network, which also means that PTC is going to fulfil its license obligation: its 3G network will have covered over 20 percent of Poland's population.
Within the blueconnect service, PTC customers also gain access to Poland's largest HotSpot network of over 340 points. These are located primarily in business centres, hotels, airports, shopping centres as well as KFC, PizzaHut and McDonald's restaurants.
The high speed wireless internet access blueconnect service was introduced to the market in April of last year. It utilises such technologies as HSDPA, UMTS, EDGE, GPRS and W-LAN. It is expected that by the end of this year some 100,000 clients will be users of the HSDPA/UMTS technology as part of the blueconnect service.
The Mobile World subscriber database estimates that Era ended the first half of this year with just under 11.1 million customers, giving them a market share of 34%. "
Posted to the site on 30th October 2006
Posted to: www.cellular-news.com/story/20105.php