Reuters reports that T-Mobile USA’s CEO said that it will not deploy UMTS data service for at least two years. Deployment of broadband-speed wireless data service is already underway at Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint PCS.
Buried in the article is an indication that T-Mobile doesn’t think that it has the capacity to proceed with a UMTS deployment, but it has a $1.32 billion dollar budget to acquire additional frequency and it is upgrading its network with EDGE– a data service that is close to 3G speed.
It’s hard to know whether this report constitutes a significant development from T-Mobile’s perspective. Since everyone I know primarily uses their mobile phone as a phone, I think having economical data service that works at a reasonable speed will be more important than being able to say that you have a network capable of streaming video in 2005. [ via MobileBurn ]