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. 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 from cellular-news.com