AT&T Wireless launches UMTS in two more markets

AT&T Wireless today launched UMTS service in San Diego and Dallas, bringing its total footprint to six markets and beating its end-of-year goal for expanding its 3G network by four months.

AT&T Wireless launched its high-speed wide-area network in July, making it the first carrier to deploy UMTS in the U.S. though not the first to market with a 3G network. Verizon Wireless beat out AT&T by nine months, launching CDMA 1x EV-DO service in San Diego and Washington D.C. last October with additional launches scheduled for later this year. The remaining carriers have discussed plans for 3G, but none have laid out any official deployment timelines.

AT&T’s initial launch--in Detroit, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle--used Nortel gear, but for today’s launch AT&T is using Ericsson equipment, which the carrier has been testing since the two began their 3G trials in Dallas in late 2002. Currently only two handsets are available UMTS-enabled: Nokia’s 6651 and Motorola’s 6651, both retailing for around $300. AT&T Wireless is also offering a PC modem card supplied by Novatel.

Cingular will obviously gain AT&T Wireless’s new networks if its buyout goes through this year as planned, putting the newly merged carrier on a definite 3G track. While AT&T Wireless has not committed to building out more markets with UMTS, it has already exceeded the four UMTS markets it was required to build in order to meet its investment agreement with minority stake-holder NTT DoCoMo, a huge UMTS proponent in Japan.

UMTS provides an average data speed between 220 kb/s and 320 kb/s with occasional burst rates of 384 kb/s, far in excess of the dial-up-like speeds current GPRS and EDGE networks achieve, but still below the 300 kb/s to 500 kb/s, 1x EV-DO networks are currently boasting. UMTS advocates point out however that the technology is only in its first evolution. High speed downlink packet access networks (HSDPA) are touted as supporting peak downstream rates of 14.4 Mb/s.