T-Mobile claims to soon have fastest 3G in U.S.

From CNET News.com: T-Mobile USA said it will soon have bragging rights as the nation's fastest 3G network. But will the claim to fame help the company attract new customers?

Executives at the CTIA trade show here on Tuesday outlined the company's network upgrade plans to a technology called HSPA+ that will effectively triple its network download speeds on its 3G wireless network by the end of the year.

T-Mobile admits that it got to the 3G wireless party late, but executives at the company said current upgrades to their network will offer faster speeds to more consumers than even new 4G wireless networks being built by Verizon Wireless and Clearwire, which is partnering with Sprint Nextel.

"We were late with 3G," Neville Ray, senior vice president of engineering and operations at T-Mobile USA, said during an interview. "But we've been catching up rapidly. And now with HSPA+ we will surpass our competitors."

Today, T-Mobile's 3G network can reach about 206 million people in the U.S. Last year, the company completed a network upgrade that brought HSPA 7.2 technology to its entire 3G footprint. Since then the company has been aggressively building fiber backhaul, the network that connects radio towers to the wired infrastructure of the Internet. So far, T-Mobile has upgraded just more than 10,000 wireless bay stations, which covers less than half of its 3G footprint. By the end of the year, it expects to double the number of bay stations with fiber backhaul.

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