Today’s launch in Chicago; Reno, Nev.; Fresno and Sacramento, Calif.; and the region surrounding Los Angeles (though not in LA itself) – coupled with activations on Monday in Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis – bring its total upgraded footprint to 23 markets covering more than 100 million people. While T-Mobile doesn’t sell the device yet, customers with unlocked iPhones can use them on the carrier’s network. But only in areas where the upgrade is complete will they get anything beyond a 2G connection.

Though in the rest of country the network officially hasn’t seen the upgrade – which will move a portion of T-Mo’s HSPA+ network to the 1900 MHz PCS band – customers with unlocked iPhones have reported seeing HSPA+ signals from New York to LA, cities where their Apple devices would normally be restricted to pokey 2G speeds. Right up to its launch this week, Chicago was a hotbed of signal sightings so T-Mobile obviously has many more markets in the works.

T-Mobile is rushing to complete its network reconfiguration for a number of reasons. Not only will it be fully compatible with the iPhone’s 2G and 3G radios when it starts selling the device next year, but the sooner it relocates HSPA+ to the PCS band, the sooner it can start building its new LTE network.

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But, as I reported in this 4-part series last week, while data centers can create hundreds, or even a thousand, jobs during the year-long construction phase, data centers generally employ just 50 to 70 full-time workers when they are up and running. Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina employed 67 full time “badged” workers in first year of operation; Facebook has 60 full-time workers for the first building of its two-building data center complex in Forest City, North Carolina. And these full time jobs tend to be very specialized, and don’t necessarily pull from a local economically-depressed community.

While data centers might not be the answer to providing jobs to a local population with a high unemployment rate, attracting a number of data centers to an area can have other, more intangible, benefits. Data centers buy power — a lot of it — and are attractive customers for the region’s utilities, which in turn provide jobs. And when the Internet company that is building the data center is a powerful influencer — as Apple is — other companies tend to follow in their footsteps and could also bring their data centers to the area.

Apple’s data center will be built in the Reno Technology Park, which is the largest dedicated data center campus in North America, and was started three years ago, according to long-time data center developer executive K.C. Mares, who worked on the deal. The Reno Technology Park will be unique in that it will have its own water and electrical systems, there will be 1 GW of local electrical generation, and much of that will come from natural gas or clean energy, said Mares.

Apple isn’t the only company that will build on the Reno Technology Park. Mares tells me that his development group is in discussions with other tenants to build there too. Some of those companies may build data centers larger than the one that Apple will build, says Mares. If the Park can bring in a number of high-profile data center tenants, it could start to collectively make a dent in the region’s economy. But in terms of jobs for local workers? Data centers just don’t offer enough to turn around a slumping city.

Image courtesy of Jcantroot.

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