T-Mobile Austria dumps Flash-OFDM plans

T-Mobile Austria announced it has canceled its plans to roll out a Flash-OFDM network in the country and returned its 450 MHz license to the country's telecom regulator. T-Mobile was going to use the technology to expand mobile broadband coverage to rural areas of Austria. It was going to be used as a complementary service to its HSDPA network.

The conditions of the license required the company to begin construction of the network by the end of last year. The company paid about $1 million for the license in 2006. T-Mobile already operates a Flash-OFDM network in Slovakia.

Flash-OFDM has for the most part fallen to the wayside since Qualcomm bought the business in early 2006 [1]. Qualcomm's intentions for the technology were never to keep it commercial but to use the technology's intellectual property as the world's operators are moving to an all-OFDM world. The technology took an unexpected turn last September when telecom heavyweight TeliaSonera Finland Oyj made a deal to provision wireless broadband services from Digita Oy's Flash-OFDM broadband network that operates in the 450 MHz band in Finland.

To read more about T-Mobile Austria's decision to dump its 450 MHz license:
- check out this article [2] from cellular-news.com

Related articles:
A resurgence of Flash-OFDM? Editorial [3]
TeliaSonera Finland uses Flash-OFDM as fixed play Report [4]