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Wireless Broadband FAQ, the Verizon LTE

With the recent 4G network testing, done in Boston and Seattle, of the Verizon Wireless network it didn’t just go well but it went surprisingly well. The testing offered data speeds that actually topped nearly all connections of wired broadband. We always manage to get some technology buzzwords of the year and with speeds like that coming with such promise the 4G is an appropriate buzzword of the year.
With the ensuing battle for 4G leadership and supremacy from Verizon, AT&T and Sprint the following is what you need to know. We’ll start off with the Verizon LTE network.
The LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. The term is for the continual process for improvement of wireless technology. LTE-Advanced is actually already in the works. With the current technology generation being 3G the LTE is the purported 4G.
There is a little debate currently as to whether or not the LTE is actually the end of the wireless broadband evolution when it comes to the 4G wireless technology. The debate is very expected to become completely mute as other major carries start to rollout their LTE hyping it as their offering of 4G technology.
The major thing customers are going to acquire from moving to LTE is going to be the higher data speeds and the high hope of having less congestion. At this point this isn’t yet proven and one possibility is that as more and more users are added to a 4G system that it could potentially become as troubled as some of the 3G networks.
The current LTE testing of Verizon has found that download speeds are found en route for being between 5-12mbps along with upload speeds of 2-5mbps. There have actually been download speeds seen of up to 50mbps. These speeds if they actually hold up in a mass real world scenario would be faster than any of the business and home wired broadband connections.
The speed figures quoted are based on the Seattle and Boston testing previously mentioned and is much better than the 6mbps that Verizon had hopes for. It’s not really clear as to what the future holds once it’s added to more markets but Verizon plans to offer the LTE in an additional 25-30 based upon the successful testing.
AT&T is looking to make LTE available widely next year and T-Mobile is currently planning an LTE network but there is no timeframe for it at this time.
Sprint working with Clearwire will be offering a competing 4G which is called WiMax. Sprint says that its first 4G smartphone is going to be available before the middle of the year and just began offering a mobile hotspot of 3G/4G. Although Sprint has had an operational 4G network since 2008 it only covers 30 million people currently and an expansion planned for this year will bump that up significantly to around 120 million potentials.
With all of the plans for 4G for 2010 this really might as well be coined the year of 4G.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 4:48 pm by Matt Heman and is filed under Verizon Wireless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.