Cingular Wireless said that it will initially rollout GPRS in California, Nevada, and Washington during the second quarter of this year, with parts of the southeastern U.S. to follow later in the year.

Cingular Wireless Internet Express is the brand name of the operator’s 3G services. Subscribers can expect an always-on connection to the Internet via Cingular’s portal ‘My Wireless Window,’ with the convenience of making voice calls while on the Internet. In addition, they can utilize features such as e-mail, mobile-to-moblie text messaging, information alerts, and numeric messaging.

The company said that specific handsets and pricing will be disclosed at a later date.

Cingular’s announcement follows on the heels of a similar announcement from Sprint PCS Wireless that it will begin to roll out stage one of its four-phase deployment plan of 3G services beginning later this year. Building on its CDMA network, the company will implement a cdma2000 migration strategy which will able it to upgrade its existing network by simply changing channel cards in the majority of its base stations, said Oliver Valente, chief technology officer for Sprint PCS. "This will allow us to make a smooth transition in a subsequentially more cost effective and timely manner compared to our competitors, he added.

• First Phase of deployment will result in the eventual doubling of the voice capacity of the network; tenfold increase in the data speed from 14.4 kbps up to 144 kbps; and increase in battery performance life in standby mode by about 50 percent.
• Second Phase will result in transmission speeds up to 307 kbps by early 2003.
• Third Phase will see speeds peak up to 2.4 mbps with 3G cdma2000 1xEV-Data Only by late in 2003.
• Fourth Phase should produce speeds up to 3 mbps with 3G1xEV-Data and Voice by early 2004.

Over the course of the deployment, subscribers can expect to be offered such applications as streaming video and audio, high-speed Internet browsing, e-mail with attachments, digital imaging, rich messaging, on-demand conferencing, and voice-to-text applications.