T-Mobile USA held a press conference in New York earlier to announce that it will roll out a UMTS-based 3G service starting this year. The rollout will continue through into 2009 at a cost of some $2.1 billion USD. T-Mobile acquired about 120 new licenses covering a wide spectrum of data and voice services in an auction earlier this year. The network will support HSDPA and will support UMA which well let users transition between cellular and Wi-Fi.
Unfortunately, new phones will need to be developed as the newly acquired spectrums fall in the 1,700-MHz and 2,100-MHz bands (European 2,100MHz devices are configured differently and will not work on the T-Mobile network).