While Sprint has short-shifted to fourth gear with WiMax, T-Mobile remains dedicated to pushing the gas pedal to the floor in third with HSPA+ 3G. On Wednesday, the carrier will throw the switch on HSPA+ towers in 24 new cities, including Portland, Minneapolis and Baltimore.
The total list of cities now reaches 45, with double that expected by the year’s end, to blanket a total of 100 cities, and 185 million Americans, with coverage. For the moment, T-Mobile still just barely lags behind Clear for high-speed wireless coverage. The WiMax carrier, which also provides WiMax for Sprint, currently covers 50 markets.
T-Mobile has been advertising – to the ire of AT&T – that its HSPA+ network delivers 4G-like theoretical speeds of up to 21 mbps down and 5.7 mbps down. Even with real-life download speeds that T-Mobile’s senior director of engineering Mark McDiarmid claims are closer to 5 and 8 mbps, that puts the network performance right on par or faster than Sprint and Clear’s WiMax service. Our own 4G tests seem to bear out – but stay tuned for a more detailed comparison now that HSPA+ has reached our fair city of Portland.
To coincide with the additional launch cities, T-Mobile also announced the new webConnect Rocket 2.0 USB laptop stick, which lets laptop owners tap full HSPA+ speeds. The $50 modem should perform identically to the first webConnect Rocket (which will be phased out), but offers a new swiveling USB hinge.
Even without the new hardware, T-Mobile claims 3G customers using any of the 16 3G devices it currently offers should notice speed improvements. The carrier’s first true HSPA+ smartphone will be announced later this summer, to be followed by an updated HSPA+ version of the G1 in the fall.
The full list of new HSPA+ cities includes:
- Austin, TX
- El Paso, TX
- Fort Worth, TX
- San Antonio, TX
- Waco, TX
- Baltimore, MD
- Baton Rouge, LA
- Lafayette, LA
- Birmingham, AL
- Cincinnati, OH
- Cleveland, OH
- Columbus, OH
- Dayton, OH
- Ft. Lauderdale, FL
- Jacksonville, FL
- Greenville, SC
- Honolulu, HI
- Indianapolis, IN
- Kansas City, MO
- Milwaukee, WI
- Minneapolis, MN
- Portland, OR
- St. Louis, MO
- Wichita, KS.
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