Cingular rolls out first HSDPA phone

Cingular Wireless introduced the first phone for its HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) network on Monday, tapping into its fastest wireless technology to power handheld entertainment services such as TV.

HSDPA was launched by Cingular late last year, but so far Cingular customers have only been able to use it on notebook PCs with PC Card or built-in modems.

The network offers typical downstream speeds of 400K bps (bits per second) to 700K bps, with burst speeds as high as 1M bps, Cingular says.

The availability of handsets will help Cingular subscribers use the network for consumer applications, namely the Cingular Video service, which offers news, sports, movie trailers and clips from TV shows.

Like other mobile operators, Cingular is counting on consumer enthusiasm for phone-based entertainment, along with enterprise use, to help make expensive high-speed networks pay off. The HSDPA infrastructure, now covering 18 major markets, should be available in most major markets by the end of this year, the carrier said.

The LG CU500, from the LG MobileComm U.S.A. unit of South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc., is a clamshell phone that includes a music player for MP3, AAC and AAC Plus songs. It comes with a 1.3 megapixel camera with a rotating lens and video capability, as well as a MicroSD slot for storage. It supports three instant messaging services — AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger — as well as Cingular’s MusicID, a service that lets users identify songs by having the phone “listen” to it.

Where HSDPA is not available, the phone can fall back to slower networks such as GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution). It supports four spectrum bands (850MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz), which equip the phone to work in many European and Asian countries, though not necessarily at HSDPA speeds.

Cingular’s fastest handsets to date have used its nationwide EDGE network, which offers between 75K bps and 135K bps, spokesman Ritch Blasi said.

The phone is available now at select stores and Cingular’s Web site for US$99.99 with a two-year contract. A $50 mail-in rebate is available to customers who sign up for an unlimited Media Net plan. Cingular will probably soon launch another HSDPA phone, the Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. ZX-20, Blasi said.

Cingular, a joint venture of AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp., has been playing catch-up with Verizon Wireless Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. on 3G (third generation) offerings. Verizon and Sprint already have phones and widely deployed networks using EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized), a high-speed version of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). That network likewise offers average downstream speeds of 400Kbps to 700Kbps, and it bursts at about 2M bps.