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.
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News source: c|net
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