Starting Tuesday, AT&T has exactly two years to roll out NTT DoCoMo's new wireless network on a revised schedule, and $6.2 billion in AT&T stock says it will be on time.
That's the gist of an amendment filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) putting teeth into the requirement that AT&T will launch at least 1,000 cell sites in San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas and San Diego using a new wireless technology by Dec. 31, 2004. NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest telecom, invested the money in January 2001 as part of a long-term agreement with AT&T Wireless to roll out so-called 3G, or third-generation, cell phone service in the United States. The deal, signed in December 2000, stipulates that the companies would launch w-CDMA-based services in 13 of the top 50 wireless markets by June 30, 2004. The amendment scales back that schedule to four markets by the end of 2004.
Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) is an emerging cell network standard that triples network capacity without requiring a network upgrade by carriers. The standard is also known as the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS).
According to the DoCoMo filing on Thursday, AT&T Wireless is on the hook to meet the new launch deadline or it will have to buy back its own stock from DoCoMo for the original purchase price plus interest.
View: The full story
News source: c|net
