The Unofficial Cingular Weblog

Today Cingular officially launched HSDPA/UMTS service branded as BroadbandConnect. The broadband connect service is targeted at business customers. It is live in 16 cities across the US including Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Tacoma and Washington D.C. Cingular takes the title as the first HSDPA provider with wide coverage in the world. HSDPA will feature an average speed of 400-700kbps with a burst rate of upto 1.8mbps in its first iteration. HSDPA will allow for seamless integration with existing data technologies including EDGE and GPRS. This includes seamless "hand-down" from 3G to 2.5 and 2G voice and data service. At first release "hand-up" but the specification is provided for with HSDPA and will more than likely be added in the future. We can assume that this is because its much more likely for someone to leave a 3G service area than enter one when traveling.

The best part of Cingular's new HSDPA service is the ability for simultaneous voice and data transfer, something that is not available with competitors 3G CDMA EV-DO networks at the time.

In addition the move to 3G will provide great reductions in cost for calls and data transfer on Cingulars network, leaving more revenue for expansion, upgrades, research and features.