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T-Mobile USA says no 3G until 2007

T-Mobile

T-Mobile USA just wrote its own obituary. The CEO of the company admitted that he doesn't see them launching a high-speed 3G wireless service within the next two years, mainly because they just don't have the spectrum for it right now. So basically T-Mobile subscribers will have wait until 2007 if they want 3G, but the cold reality is that a lot of them probably won't want to wait and will defect to other carriers that have been a little more proactive about 3G. Verizon's already started rolling out their high-speed EV-DO service in a bunch of different cities, Sprint's going to be building out their own EV-DO network soon, Cingular is currently testing a high-speed UMTS service which they hope to introduce next year (and of course, they recently absorbed AT&T Wireless' 3G service, which is available in a handful of cities). T-Mobile is currently upgrading their network to EDGE, which is like a faster version of GPRS, but they should have started doing that a long time ago. By the time they have that ready, everyone else will already be a step ahead.