Rolling out an LTE network may be T-Mobile’s longer-term goal, but in the near term, it still has customers cruising on its 4G HSPA+ network to satisfy. Today in a blog post, T-Mobile USA CTO Neville Ray announced that the company recently expanded the availability of its 4G HSPA+ network which includes eight new cities.

Texans in Abilene, Amarillo, Odessa, and Victoria Texas along with Bakersfield California now have faster network speeds on 42Mbps HSPA+ capable devices. So do customers in Eau Claire, Wisconsin plus Joplin and St. Joseph, Missouri. With this expansion, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network now covers 200 million people in 225 new markets.

Neville also explained, “The evolution of HSPA+ is still an opportunity for us and offering HSPA+ 84 (84Mbps theoretical download speeds) is something we’ll continue to evaluate because the capability is there in the network.” “That said, our priority now is preparing our network for LTE in 2013,” it continued.

It should come as no surprise that with T-mobile about to launch the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G and the HTC One S just around the corner, that they would up the 4G markets just prior to launch.

Source - T-Mobile