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AT&T To Launch LTE Network In 5 Cities This Summer
tekgoblin writes "AT&T is looking to get a piece of the 4G LTE pie that Verizon has a firm grasp on. They have announced today that they are going to roll out 4G in Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio this summer and another 10 markets yet to be determined later in the year."
Do they think people are really that unaware of the problems with their network that they'll believe that AT&T LTE will work any better than AT&T as it is?
I'd be happy with 3G speeds. 1 mbps is all I ask.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Five whole cities?
Seriously though, why didnt they do this when VZW started doing it, instead of spending so much on advertising about how awesome their network was (when it wasnt). If they would have taken the advertising dollars and actually spent it on the network to make it do what they claimed it could, maybe people wouldnt constantly rate them the lowest in customer satisfaction.
4G shoudl get you 1Gbps when stationary and 100Mbps when on the move (in car or bus). Here, in developing Estonia, we get 21Mbps everywhere and in some areas (towns) 42 Mbps from 3.5G networks. It seems unfair, that you pay more to get less.
ITU relented. LTE is now officially 4G, according to them.
Lame, but what can you do? Their 4G definition would be nice, but it is impractical to have the next network naming standard be for a technology that is years off, and with at least one level of interim network speed technology between them.
The ______ Agenda
New York City was one of their biggest Achilles heel after they released the iPhone. A city with millions of people and a network nowhere NEAR able to cope with it. Pretty much everyone I know in NY who had an iPhone basically said it was unusable if you were not at a WiFi hot spot.
It is conspicuous that they have chosen not to roll out to such a large market in the first wave (which Verizon did). I guess they really don't want to get another black eye like they did with the iPhone roll out.
...after which VerizATT will rewrite their contracts to forbid the end user from disseminating negative comments regarding their service reliability and then finance the purchases of the judges required to enforce said contract by charging you by the bit transmitted or received in their only available service plan...a service plan that makes accepting unsolicited advertising mandatory.
Although come to think of it, one or two more telecom mergers and monopolization will mean that it won't matter if the remaining corporation(s) have a bad rap for service. It will be like it, or leave it...at least until an equally well-paid Congress passes a law requiring you to purchase their service in order to give law enforcement the ability to track you via GPS. For the sake of America's security, donchaknow.
lollll...I'm kidding...
Probably.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Strangely enough, my cable internet was dropping connections, so on my Atrix I disabled my wireless and watched Conan in HD using a 3 bar HSPA+, and it actually started fast and ran smooth (no buffering).
Of course, I wonder how much content I can even watch with the 2 GB plan. Would be useful if I could see the bitrate of what I'm watching...
Real problem is that AT&T's 3G signal doesn't travel through walls very well.
Switching from an iPhone to an Atrix 4g though, I'm seeing that the iPhone definitely made AT&T's network seem crappier than it really was. The atrix even handles Edge data a bit faster than the iphone 3G on a purely throughput perspective.
The ITU got it half right. What is 4G if not the fourth generation of cellular networks? To me, LTE and WiMax, both coming after 3G networks and being both faster and newer technology are a fourth generation. Anything HSPA-derived is not, it's just evolved 3G technology, so call it 3.5G or 3.9G, whatever. Unfortunately, when changing the terms to allow the current incarnations of LTE and WiMax to count as 4G the ITU basically gave in to T-Mobile's marketing team and allowed HSPA networks to be called 4G as well if they're fast enough. AT&T was rightfully fighting this behavior before the ITU allowed it, then immediately changed course and jumped on the "oh yea, we have '4G' too!!!!" bandwagon.
I wonder what AT&T and T-Mobile plan to do to differentiate their LTE-equipped proper 4G devices from the pile of current 3G devices their marketards have labeled as 4G. The average consumer is likely to be very confused.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.