Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Cingular Launches EDGE in Indianapolis

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 08:56:51 -0400

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Wireless Week
Breaking News Alert
June 30, 2003
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Cingular Launches EDGE in Indianapolis

By Sue Marek

Cingular Wireless edged out its GSM carrier competitors, including
AT&T Wireless, in the race to be the first operator in the United
States and worldwide to commercially deploy EDGE technology. The
company launches EDGE today in Indianapolis, Ind., giving subscribers
there access to average data speeds ranging between 70 kilobits per
second to 135 kbps with peak data rates of 170 kbps.

In conjunction with the technology launch, Cingular will be selling
the Nokia 6200 EDGE handset, which is backward compatible with GPRS
and programmed to stay "on network" so that customers traveling from
an EDGE market to a GPRS market will still have coverage and data
sessions will not be dropped. The handset will sell for $199 with a
two-year service agreement.

According to Bill Clift, CTO of Cingular Wireless, the company chose
Indianapolis because that market was equipped with radio gear from
Ericsson, which was the first vendor to have EDGE software
commercially ready.  According to Anders Olin, executive vice
president and general manager of the Cingular account for Ericsson,
the upgrade from GSM/GPRS to EDGE in that market was fairly simple.
"EDGE is a natural extension of GSM," Olin says.

In addition, Cingular picked Indianapolis because it wanted to
evaluate the technology in a market with both 1900 MHz and 800 MHz
spectrum to see how the software handled handoffs between the two
frequencies. "This market had all the right characteristics," Clift
says.

The EDGE overlay covers all Cingular cell sites in the Indianapolis
market, however Clift says that when you travel to the edge of a rural
cell, the data throughput slows down slightly. But overall Clift says
that EDGE is performing well in Indianapolis, providing good signal
strength and nearly three times the throughput of GPRS.

Cingular is targeting the business and enterprise user with the
service and Clift says the company anticipates that most corporate
users will purchase the Cingular DataConnect kit along with the Nokia
6200 so they can connect the phone to their laptop.

Although Cingular hasn't revealed how many markets or which markets it
will deploy with EDGE technology by year-end, Clift says that the
company will steadily rollout EDGE over the next twelve months. "You
will see a nice steady pace of launching markets."   But at the same
time, the company is still upgrading some markets with GSM/GPRS and
expects to have all markets outfitted with GSM/GPRS by second quarter
of next year.

Beside the Nokia 6200, Clift says there will be more EDGE-compatible
devices available in the coming months. In particular, he said there
will be an EDGE PCMCIA card available by late third quarter and at
least two other EDGE handsets available by fourth quarter.

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