Well, it's better late than never. Verizon flipped the
switch on its LTE network back
in early December. Now, AT&T is strolling along with its competing LTE
network, which officially get the green light on September 18 according
to FierceWireless.
AT&T CFO John Stephens confirmed the rollout, and as
previously stated, the five debut markets will be Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas,
Houston, and San Antonio. AT&T hopes to expand to 15 markets and reach 70
million U.S. residents by the end of 2011.
For comparison's sake, Verizon's LTE network currently
reaches 160 million Americans (185 million by year's end) and is available in
143 markets (175 by year's end).
As we reported earlier in the month, AT&T has two
fresh LTE devices available for its rollout: the USBConnect Momentum 4G and
the Mobile Hotspot Elevate 4G. The older USBConnect Adrenaline received a
firmware update last month to make it compatible with AT&T's LTE network.
In addition to the Momentum 4G and Elevate 4G, AT&T
announced late last month that the HTC
Jetstream would also operate on its LTE network. The Jetstream is a
10.1" Android (Honeycomb) tablet that features a 1.5GHz dual-core
processor and features an 8mp camera will dual-LED flash.
The Jetstream is priced at a whopping $699.99 with a
two-year contract.
One thing to keep in mind is that Apple's iPhone will be launching
sometime within the next month. The current iPhone 4 is still relegated to
3G data speeds while most of the competition has moved on to true 4G
(LTE/WiMAX) or faux-4G
(HSPA+). We're almost certain that the next generation iPhone will support
HSPA+ when it is announced, but we hope that LTE is in the cards as well.
