SteveGavJR

Apparently, T-mobile hasn't been slacking in the technology department. According to the wikipedia, the spectrum purchased by t-mobile in 2006 were at that time still occupied by the government. T-mobile has worked diligently(so they claim) to put hardware in place so that when the bands were free, they could launch their new network. However, in September 2007, the government still has not released the 1700 and 2100mhz frequencies.

Quote:

3G Upgrade (from wikipedia) In September 2006, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) offered, at auction, licenses in the first Advanced Wireless Services band. This band was an area of wireless spectrum, half in the 1700MHz and half in the 2100 MHz frequencies, that was already in use by government services but would be available at some point in the future when those services moved to different frequencies. The auction made numerous licenses available in overlapping market-area, economic-areas, and regional levels. Each license was individually bid upon, and T-Mobile was the winner in 120 license auctions, at an aggregate price of $4.18 billion. As part of its winnings, T-Mobile gained nationwide coverage of 10 MHz or 20 MHz, with numerous areas being supplemented with addition licenses. Examples include New York City, Chicago, and Boston where T-Mobile acquired 30 MHz (one-third) of the available spectrum, or San Francisco, Houston, and Miami where they acquired 40 MHz (45%) of the available spectrum. Two weeks after confirming their winning bids, on Oct 6, 2006, T-Mobile announced their intentions to create a UMTS third generation, or 3G, cellular network with the spectrum they had won. T-Mobile USA said it would utilize and build on the experience of T-Mobile Europe, which already implemented its own 3G network, and at roll-out they intend to offer 7.2 Mbit/s service. The upgrade is forecast to cost $2.6 billion, in addition to the $4.12 billion spent to acquire the spectrum. During the Oct 6 announcement, T-Mobile indicated they had already begun to deploy about half of the upgraded equipment, beginning in major markets such as New York City. With the equipment in place, they would be able to activate their network as soon as the current users, various government services, vacated these frequencies. T-Mobile had hoped to have its network activated by mid-2007, however as of September 2007 the government users had not vacated the AWS band.

I thought this might be interesting to anyone currently using t-mobile and wondering why they're still using edge...