T-Mobile USA has long been the only one of America's big four carrier's not to offer 3G services. Ah, but the operator turned out to be the big winner in the FCC's recent spectrum auction, paying $4.2 billion for 120 licenses. What exactly does T-Mobile plan to do with all that extra space? Greatly expand its current capabilities and deliver high-speed cellular UTMS/HSPDA broadband services to customers of course. HSDPA is a more advanced and backwards-compatible version of UTMS.

The carrier is rolling out its 3G services on the 1700 and 2100 MHz bands at a cost of $2.1 billion. According to T-Mobile CEO Robert Dotson, at a recent press conference, the operator has already started deploying UTMS equipment in some places, such as New York City, through advanced planning since 2004.

Country-wide rollout won't be completed until 2008.

T-Mobile plans to start offering UTMS/HSDPA data services (e.g. Web, e-mail, MMS, music, video, etc.) to subscribers commercially by the middle of next year. That's when you'll start to see compatible handsets and peripherals ship. "We have been working with our major handset providers over the past 12 months to prepare products for deployment in the new spectrum band," Dotson said.

Through HSDPA, Dotson stated that T-Mobile will offer 3G data services at speeds of 7.2 Mbps, according to eWeek. This is far speedier than other operators current broadband offerings. By comparison, Cingular's HSDPA service averages 400 to 700 Kbps.

T-Mobile's 3G network won't be compatible with those built for other regions, so phones used with European-carrier high-speed cellular UTMS/HSPDA data services, for example, won't work, and vice versa. They're reportedly off by a few MHz. Instead, handsets will drop down to 2.5G EDGE data speeds when used from one region to the other.

Dotson also confirmed T-Mobile's (not so secret) plan to roll Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) services shortly as well. UMA is an emerging dual-mode style fixed-mobile convergence standard that allows GSM carriers to seamlessly handoff calls and data connections between cellular and short-range wireless technologies like Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth.

With thousands of hotspots, T-Mobile users could theoretically walk off the street while on the phone, enter Starbucks, and trip over to the Wi-Fi network while still talking (freeing up cell tower space for other calls while T-Mobile still gets money for the minutes used).

The focus of T-Mobile’s UMA service will likely be home users at first. These folks should be able use their phones for cellular calls or make voice over Wi-Fi calls through their own home network, without needing a separate service like Skype, which would entail getting a separate phone number.

While, as we said, T-Mob’s UMA service will focus on the home, it'll makes sense - and this would appear to be the carrier's ultimate goal - for the company to leverage its extensive hotspot portfolio outside customers houses soon afterwards.

The phones T-Mobile plans to offer for its initial UMA deployment are the Samsung SGH-T709 and Nokia 6136.

The two routers are from Linksys and D-Link. Both include a button to ease the connection of a Wi-Fi enabled phone in the home without inputting a WEP or WPA security key.