T-Mobile exposes their 3G gap to the world: It's exhibitionist time, with T-Mobile admitting that their 3G plan is to wait two years before deploying UMTS, giving them a gap for wireless data large enough for Verizon and Cingular and Sprint to eat their lunch. I'm not sure why T-Mobile is waiting. There are practical reasons--spectrum is expensive and not plentiful--but I would be going the VoIP + Wi-Fi + 3G route.
If I had T-Mobile's large Wi-Fi hotspot network. I would be aggressively working with handset vendors to be the first to deploy a Wi-Fi/GSM hybrid phone in the U.S. and give away Wi-Fi gateways to customers as a promotion. I would have the phones set to use EAP-SIM or a similar authentication in T-Mobile locations. I would aggressively open the Wi-Fi network to roaming to encourage use of the Wi-Fi/GSM phone in other Wi-Fi locations--especially airports and hotels. I'd sell business travelers a nifty little portable Ethernet to Wi-Fi bridge.
And I'd deploy UMTS like gangbusters. Offloading voice to Wi-Fi, encouraging the growth of Wi-Fi use, and deploying 3G would be a combined plan that it would take Cingular until 2006 to meet, and Verizon and Sprint don't really have a gameplan to own enough to make it happen faster.
But that's just me. This business plan overview brought to you at no charge by Glenn's notion that he knows more than people running multi-billion-dollar companies.
On the other hand. T-Mobile provides a flat rate plan for data at a price their competition doesn't provide. If when the starting rolling out EDGE the hold the line at the current prices, keep GPRS and lower the rate, that might still entice people.
While it's nice to have faster data speeds, it also has to be at a price people can afford.
I also think T-Mobile would be smart to drop the rate of their Hotspot access for their customers. Frankly, I think they should just give their cell customers free access at their hotspots, or at the least a free amount of hours (say 8?) per month. They've got to shore up SBC's assult in the hotspot area.
At the end of the day, though, I imagine the percentage of total cell phone users that use data is pretty low, so this might not affect T-Mobile too much. There are ways they can keep their existing customers happy by having the best customer service or the best coverage.
T-Mobile is effectively conceding the Enterprise market.
Meaningful enterprise applications need more bandwidth than GPRS can provide. Their flat-rate pricing might entice consumers who want to check email, but not business customers that want to mobilize an application that resides behind their firewall.