Verizon unveiled its LTE schedule this morning at the CTIA conference in San Francisco. Lowell McAdam, president and chief operating officer of Verizon, detailed the company’s major network launch in 38 major metropolitan areas, covering more than 110 million Americans, by the end of the year.
McAdam said the metropolitan areas for the initial launch will include:
- Large sections of the Northeast Corridor, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. as well as Rochester, New York
- Throughout Miami and south Florida, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and New Orleans as well as Charlotte, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee
- Chicagoland, St. Louis, the Twin Cities, Pittsburgh and major cities in Ohio
- Major population centers in California as well as Seattle, Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas
In addition, the company is launching 4G LTE in more than 60 commercial airports coast to coast – both the airports within the launch areas plus airports in other key cities.
Verizon Wireless expects 4G LTE average data rates to be 5 to 12 megabits per second (Mbps) on the downlink and 2 to 5 Mbps on the uplink in real-world, loaded network environments. The lower 700 MHz band that Verizon and AT&T use has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is it can penetrate walls and has about 4 times the range of 2.6 GHz WiMAX (all other things remaining about equal). The disadvantage is that many times more users will be trying to access fewer towers. That may mean capacity limits, slower speed and data caps.
Verizon’s video shows a good PR model, with coffee shop venues showcasing nearby microcells serving a handful of users with fast speed and good connectivity. The real test will come 12-24 months down the line when 100 people sharing a tower try to get something more than 1 Mbps. Adding additional 700 Mhz cells may (or may not) be an exercise in self-interference.
Verizon said it will have half a dozen LTE smartphones and tablets available in the first half of next year, but did not provide any further details, including when specifically the service will launch this year and what it would cost. “We think there’s a place for unlimited plans,” Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam noted, “but we think that over time, because we have finite resources, our customers are going to have to shift to a pay-as-you-use” mode. “I would say that clearly over time we will be migrating to a bucket-of-megabytes” approach.
A complete list of Verizon’s LTE cities is here.
AT&T plans to have 70-75 million Americans covered by LTE by the end of 2011, with the network falling back to HSPA+ where LTE isn’t available.
AT&T’s USBConnect Shockwave and Adrenaline will operate on both AT&T’s HSPA mobile broadband network and the company’s LTE network.
The Adrenaline will be AT&T’s first LTE-upgradeable device and the Shockwave the first HSPA+ capable device from the company.
LTE roaming is likely a long way off says Fierce Wireless. For an LTE handset to roam among the viable LTE networks in the United States over the next few years (assuming Clearwire offers LTE), it likely will have to support all of these frequency bands:
- 700 MHz (AT&T and Verizon LTE bands)
- 850 MHz (normal 3G bands)
- 1700 MHz/2100 MHz (AWS band for MetroPCS and others)
- 1900 MHz (PCS 3G frequencies
- 2.5 GHz (Clearwire and T-Mobile?)
We’re not even including LightSquared’s L-band spectrum for LTE services in the 1.6 GHz band.
