There’s nothing easy about being smallest national mobile-phone carrier. Competing day to day for customers against AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Next Corp. is brutal enough. But it’s also about keeping pace — technologically and otherwise — with the top three cellphone operators.

It is not enough to have a national footprint to be in the game. You have to have a fat wireless pipe capable of supporting the swift carriage of data-intensive multimedia content. These must be gut-wrenching days for T-Mobile USA, which is finding the road to 3G littered with landmines.

Last week, Federal Communications Commission engineers conducted tests in Seattle for potential interference from advanced wireless services-3 operations in the 2155-2180 MHz bands. T-Mobile USA spent $4.2 billion for 120 licenses at the AWS-1 auction in 2006. It was an investment in the future, one aimed at avoiding futility and irrelevance in a market where AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless have gained strength, while Sprint Nextel struggles mightily.

So it is that T-Mobile USA, hoping to expand its 3G reach from New York City to another 25 markets by year’s end, finds itself headed toward the critical holiday season with so much at stake. T-Mobile USA sought testing in the face of an initiative spearheaded by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to put 20 megahertz of AWS-3 spectrum in play in hopes of seeing a big-time wireless broadband carrier emerge to compete against the landline telephone-cable TV high-speed Internet duopoly. M2Z Networks Inc., hungry for a chance to work AWS-3 spectrum into its ambitious business plan, claims T-Mobile USA has faulty filters. While the food fight between T-Mobile USA and M2Z is outwardly about interference, T-Mobile USA may not want to see an FCC AWS-3 ruling — one with possible implications for the million or so 3G handsets in use or in the pipeline — at a time when it is racing to get phones into retail outlets by Thanksgiving. T-Mobile USA has a great opportunity to capture disenfranchised customers from a weakened Sprint Next during the holiday buying frenzy, but that could be hampered by an FCC AWS-3 decision in the near term.

Meantime, waiting in the wings, is a lawsuit in the 3rd Circuit that, if successful, could overturn the results of the AWS-1 auction that put T-Mobile USA in position to trade broadband punches.

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