T-Mobile expanding '4G' to cover 75M pops

T-Mobile (NYSE:DT) today announced it is expanding its high-speed packet access plus network outside of the Northeast, covering 15 new large- and mid-sized cities throughout the country to create a footprint encompassing 75 million people by the end of June. T-Mobile is targeting a complete network upgrade by the end of 2010, in hopes of allowing it to be competitive with the 4G networks emerging late this year and next.

Theoretically the network upgrade will support download speeds up to 21 Mb/s, though T-Mobile said average speeds will be more realistically in the 5 to 8 Mb/s range, with occasional peaks of 10 Mb/s for customers with HSPA+ devices. But even at those downlink rates, T-Mobile is able to match and sometimes exceed the average throughput its competitors are claiming for their WiMax and long-term evolution (LTE) networks, giving credence to T-Mobile’s claim that its 3G network supports 4G speeds, said Chris Hillabrant, regional vice president of engineering and operations for T-Mobile USA.

“If you look at how our competitors have described the 4G experience, they’re describing 3 to 6 Mb/s,” Hillabrant said, referring to the average throughput Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) and Sprint (NYSE:S) have claimed for their WiMax network. “We’ve been consistently outperforming those competitors. Can we, with a straight face, claim that we’re delivering 4G speeds over HSPA+? Yes we can,” he added.

The next 4G network to launch, Verizon Wireless’ (NYSE:VZ, NYSE: VOD) LTE deployment later this year, may put T-Mobile’s 4G claims to the test. In trials, Verizon has reported average download speeds falling between 5 to 12 Mb/s, but with peak speeds of 50 Mb/s. If VZW is able to maintain those throughput numbers after commercial launch, it will be able to far outpace HSPA+ in the best network conditions, though in poor-to-average network conditions, T-Mobile’s network would appear to match up. As industry observers have pointed out, though, after achieving a few megabits per second of capacity, the differences in network speeds become negligible from the perspective of the end user except for the most bandwidth-hungry of applications. If T-Mobile can keep HSPA+ devices operating at 5 Mb/s or greater, it will be able to offer a competitive to service to the 4G operators, though they will still have an enormous operational advantage given the far greater overall capacities their networks can support.

The expansion will bring HSPA+ upgrades to T-Mobile's networks in Los Angeles; Dallas; Atlanta; Houston; Seattle; Tampa and Orlando, Fla.; Pittsburgh; Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, N.C.; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla.; New Orleans; and Charleston, S.C. T-Mobile will also add the upgrade to the smaller markets of Bentonville, Ark.; Anderson, S.C.; and Fayetteville, N.C. The upgrade is already live in New York City; Philadelphia; Las Vegas; Memphis; Upstate New York; Connecticut; Providence, R.I.; and the Washington, D.C., suburbs.

Technically, T-Mobile has already made the HSPA+ upgrade across its entire 3G network, but backhaul bottlenecks have prevented the operator from offering the faster service to its customers across its footprint, Hillabrant said. T-Mobile may have been one of the last major operators to deploy a 3G network, but it also got some of the newest HSPA equipment on the market from its vendors Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI). In many cases the change required a simple software upgrade. In other cases some hardware had to be replaced and cabling switched out. “I don’t want to make it sound like the upgrade was effortless,” Hillabrant said, but he added that compared to an operator using UMTS or HSPA equipment from a much earlier deployment, T-Mobile’s upgrade path was far easier.

Most of the heavy-lifting in the upgrade comes from provisioning fiber links to the cell site — crucial to supporting the tripling of capacity on the network, Hillabrant said. It has managed to replace TDM links with fiber Ethernet in about 40% of its networks, but in some areas fiber is either unavailable or costly, making the upgrade more difficult. That could explain some anomalies in the network, such as why T-Mobile has brought HSPA+ to the D.C. suburbs but not the District itself.

But Hillabrand said the company has been very aggressive in dealing with its wireline fiber providers and hopes to have a fiber backhaul network in 75% of its footprint by year end. As T-Mobile completes the fiber rollout in individual markets, it will bring HSPA+ live in those markets, he said.

In order to take advantage of the increased speeds, customers must have an HSPA+ device, and so far they’ve been few and far between. T-Mobile currently offers only a dongle, the WebConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick, but it has said it plans to offer additional HSPA+ devices, including handsets by the end of the year. Once T-Mobile seeds its network with more HSPA+ devices, all of its customers, even those with plain, old HSPA devices, will start experiencing increased speeds, as the average capacity of the network increases. Though older devices won’t be able to support speeds beyond their theoretical capacity of 7.2 Mb/s, the increased speeds enjoyed by the HSPA+ devices will allow the network to schedule and deliver their data sessions and traffic faster, freeing up more capacity and throughput for HSPA-without-the-plus devices.