T-Mobile Germany claims to have completed its rollout of HSPA technology. The operator says that around 250 German cities are now able to take advantage of maximum download speeds of 7.2 Mb/s, while all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants are offered maximum download speeds of 3.6 Mb/s. Upload speeds (HSUPA) are around 1.4 Mb/s, though the operator plans to increase this to 2 Mb/s before the end of this year. It also plans to increase GSM/EDGE network coverage to all German households, and increase the number of Wi-Fi hotspots to 20,000 nationwide.

The Deutsche Telekom-owned operator also announced yesterday that it is conducting a femotcell field test in the Cologne/Bonn area. T-Mobile Germany unveiled its first femtocells – small home basestation technology designed to improve indoor mobile phone coverage – at the CeBIT exhibition earlier in the year. In March, it was announced that T-Mobile’s venture arm had made an undisclosed investment in UK femtocell start-up Ubiquisys. At the time, T-Mobile said it expected the first commercial launches of femtocells towards the end of this year.