T-Mobile goes straight for LTE, leaves 82Mbps HSPA+ plans behind

T-Mobile is currently the only one of the four major US carriers that didn’t have any specific roadmap for transitioning to a 4G LTE network. At least until a couple of days ago when the carrier unveiled its “challenger strategy” under which it will invest $4 billion in developing the high-speed LTE network with theoretical limit of 100Mbps on the downlink. Now, with the news that it will skip the upgrade to 81Mbps HSPA+, the jump to 4G LTE will be direct and should happen even faster.

Previously, as soon as at CES 2012, T-Mobile had plans for going first to 84Mbps HSPA+, up from the current 42Mbps HSPA+ network. It seems that the carrier has decided its resources will be better spent on LTE instead.

Now, the transition to 4G is expected to reduce the 2G capacity on TMo’s network, and to make up for that the carrier will stop offering 3G devices in favor of the new LTE-enabled ones. This shoud offset the effect.

source: T-Mobile, TheVerge