AT&T Wireless forges ahead with WCDMA

ATLANTA--

Answering much speculation over the last month that Cingular Wireless' pending acquisition of AT&T Wireless could delay the latter carrier's planned WCDMA trials, Rod Nelson, chief technology officer of AT&T Wireless, said at Wireless 2004 that his company is proceeding with the tests in four markets, including Seattle and San Francisco.

"We're right now in the state of advanced network trials, and we're seeing speeds comparable to the technology performance on European networks [around 384 kb/s]," Nelson said. "We haven't completed enough testing yet to settle on a specific bandwidth figure yet."

Nelson said the other two test markets will be announced at a later date. AT&T Wireless also unveiled three WCDMA 1900 MHz handsets, one each from Motorola, Nokia and NEC. Nelson said the company expects to look at a variety of applications during the tests, including usage models that would see customers using the technology as they would a broadband modem.

With the WCDMA trials, Nelson said AT&T Wireless is fulfilling what had been a four-year plan begun in 2000 to transition from TDMA to GSM/GPRS, then migrate to EDGE, and finally introduce WCDMA. The carrier's national rollout of EDGE technology was finished last fall.

Though the Cingular acquisition could close in early 2005, assuming regulatory approval of the deal, it's business as usual for the CTO of AT&T Wireless. "This year, we'll continue to focus on WCDMA," he said. "The long-range decisions about the technology would be made by Cingular. [But for now] we're still a vigorous competitor with Cingular."