Nokia Selected to Deploy WCDMA 3G for T-Mobile USA
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 12:55 PM PST In Financial/Corporate News
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has signed a contract with T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) USA, Inc. to supply third generation wireless equipment and services to support T-Mobile’s WCDMA 3G rollout in the U.S., contingent upon the FCC’s award of AWS spectrum. Nokia is delivering its industry-defining Nokia Flexi WCDMA Base Station optimized for T-Mobile’s newly acquired AWS spectrum bands. The Nokia Flexi WCDMA Base Station’s innovative, modular platform will yield significant site and operating cost savings.
"T-Mobile is pleased to be working with Nokia in deploying third-generation wireless networks and looks forward to bringing advanced wireless services to our customers," said Neville Ray, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Operations, T-Mobile USA. "WCDMA 3G technology will complement T-Mobile’s existing GSM network with greater data through-put and provide a more cost-efficient radio technology."
T-Mobile will be the first U.S. operator to deploy the fully HSPA capable Nokia Flexi WCDMA Base Station. The Nokia Flexi WCDMA Base Station enables easy deployment of WCDMA 3G in multiple spectrum bands with significantly lower base station site expenditures.
Source: Nokia PR
My E61 has WCDMA so I’m a happy camper right now. Depending on the price it may be worth it. I’m a T-Mobile customer, have been for around 3 years. Love them, never had a dropped call, and the best part is I get unlimited GPRS for $7 a month. You can’t beat that now a days.
For those of you wondering how fast WCDMA is:
In WCDMA 3G, Nokia has 64 customers to date. Almost half of the 134
commercially launched WCDMA 3G networks have Nokia equipment. Nokia’s
high-performing HSPA is a simple software upgrade to Nokia WCDMA
networks, thus enabling a fast, cost-effective rollout. Nokia HSPA is
made up of two key technologies, HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet
Access) and HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access), offering
breakthrough data speeds up to 14.4 Mbps in the downlink and up to 5.8
Mbps in the uplink.


This article may be easily misinterpreted. I believe that it is FCC ruling which band may be used for UMTS in the United States. These UMTS bands are different from the European UMTS frequencies. Since most phones do not yet support many different bands, most current Nokia phones will not work on any US 3G network. Bummer.