The race for HSPA has officially ended for T-mobile as the company has announced plans to direct all efforts towards 4G, Long-Term Evolution (LTE).  Yesterday T-mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, Joachim Horn, told Unstrung that the company will not deploy high speed packed access (HSPA) evolution (HSPA+) to get more out of its 3G mobile broadband network and will instead move straight on to LTE.  We had heard that T-mobile was testing their LTE-based network in Germany this September and the success of that trial on a 4 kilometer test track was much more serious than initially expected.

“If I need to invest into more hardware, I think it’s better to start early [with LTE]. LTE is a more future-oriented technology,” Horn told Unstrung on the sidelines of the Financial Times World Telecoms Conference in London this week.

At the moment T-mobile’s HSDPA network runs at 7.2Mbit/s, but with software upgrades they will be able to achieve 14.4Mbit/s (downlink).  While HSPA Evolution can bring that speed up to 28.8Mbit/s, the hardware changes required is exactly where T-mobile is drawing the line and reason enough to focus on LTE.  So when can we expect to see a commercial launch of LTE for T-mobile? Horn stated that, ”we believe the middle to the end of 2010 is when we’ll see the first test networks.”

Via Unstrung