Cingular and T-Mobile Exit Deal

[David McNamee]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.com.com/Cingular%2C+T-Mobile+sever+joint+venture/2100-1039_3-5219679.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news' target='_blank'>http://news.com.com/Cingular%2C+T-Mobile+sever+joint+venture/2100-1039_3-5219679.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news</a><br /><br /></div>Due, in part, to Cingular's pending acquisition of AT&T Wireless, Cingular and T-Mobile are ending a multi-year infrastructure agreement. The agreement helped Cingular enter the New York wireless market, and brought T-Mobile into California and Nevada.<br /><br />Under the break-up agreement, T-Mobile will purchase spectrum in San Francisco, Sacramento and Las Vegas, with an option to purchase additional spectrum in two years in San Diego and Los Angeles. Cingular will receive additional spectrum in New York.<br /><br />I'm not certain who makes out better in this deal, but it seems that Cingular is trying to get its network arranged for the AT&T Wireless takeover.

[David C]

This could actually be bad news for Cingular customer in California. Cingular sells the towers to T-Mobile and using AWS towers instead. AWS use 850 Mhz, which is notorious for having bad coverage. Cingular is renting tower from T-Mo for older customer who have 1.9ghz phone untill those phones die out, and switching them into 850 phones. Cingular customer will get an American only version phone, since no one else uses 1900 and 850 GSM. American version phone always are behind the rest of the world because everyone else use 900/1800, so there are only a handfull of vender who are willing to make American roamable as well as rest of the world phone. The wolrd has just bearly got used to making 1900 as the third band. I don't know how long will it be untill vender start to make quad band as a standard.