Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Promises To Expand LTE To More US Markets
WIn5t0n writes "Even though AT&T has now promoted itself to the 'Largest 4G Network' (HSPA+), it is still lagging far behind in advancing its LTE Coverage. AT&T's largest competitor, Verizon, has turned up the heat on the company now that it claims to cover 75 percent of US population with LTE, while AT&T's network only fully covers a few cities. However, AT&T has recognized consumer unrest and has planned to expand its 4G LTE coverage into '48 new markets' by the end of the year. With the iPhone 5 (rumored to have LTE capabilities) likely to be in consumers hands by the end of this month, AT&T is now feeling the pressure to make sure its customers can take full advantage of their new phones on a faster network. The company's full rollout of 4G LTE coverage is not scheduled to be complete until at least 2013."
I want to use AT&T's LTE network, I just don't want to deal with AT&T (or pay their ridiculous markup).
Nothing matters from AT&T until they remove all data caps and follow Sprint and T-Mobile's lead.
Any chance they'll raise the data caps high enough to make LTE actually useful?
A water pipe that can fill a football stadium in 1 minute flat does no good if it will only dispense half a glass of water a month.
How long till they have a network fast enough to pass a voice call to my cell at my house in one of their "excellent" reception areas?
First, they were using the term 4G before ITU. Secondly, ITU revised things just last year once again such that even LTE is not 4G according to them. Only LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced are now officially 4G.
Yes, but your phone would have to have an chip that supports all the frequency bands.
I've been told by AT&T reps for months that LTE is coming to the Salt Lake City area Real Soon Now. I didn't know what I was missing till a recent trip to a few LTE cities. I would love to have LTE, but I am not holding my breath. It was scheduled for Spring, then Some Time over the Summer, and now Maybe By the End Of the Year.
it is better to light a flame thrower than curse the darkness. -Terry Pratchett Men at Arms
And here is the source since I forgot the link.
No doubt, AT&T also promises a 10% increase in your bill to pay for these expansions.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Secondly, ITU revised things just last year once again such that even LTE is not 4G according to them. Only LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced are now officially 4G.
A lot of people misread "4G LTE" as "4G Lite". I guess they're right.
Your rainbow pooping unicorn order has been delayed...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
As the patient's condition became critical shortly before 1pm, the substitute nurse tried desperately to reach the lunching anesthetist, but to no avail.
(desperate attempt to swing it back on topic) Perhaps the point isn't that socialized health care kills as much as that loss of the cellular signal kills.
So yes...but no?
If it the different providers use different frequencies then it isn't compatible is it?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If this is false advertising, what is true advertising? Can you think of a single ad out there where the company told the complete and clear truth about a product? Anybody?
i have an iphone 4S on AT&T. i was at the store playing with a Samsung Galaxy Note yesterday. it benches at almost 12Mbps but in normal use it doesn't seem that much faster than my iphone
could it be that most phones today are still hardware limited and higher bandwidth speeds are just marketing hype?
I was in the DC metro area recently and took a screenshot of a speedtest because I couldn't believe it. A Samsung SIII on AT&T registered 45M down. Unfortunately, we can't touch that at home because there is no AT&T LTE coverage anywhere in our state.
The thing is that the same people whining about HSPA+ being called 4G will now have to say that calling LTE as 4G is false advertising due to ITU's final standardization. Only LTE-Advanced is officially 4G. In the end this all just useless pedantry.
It's no less compatible than GSM which requires your chip to support the bands used by the telecom. It's more compatible than the CDMA/GSM divide which require separate chips. LTE just needs one but obviously must have wide frequency band support to be useful just like world phones have to support multiple GSM bands.
Hopefully they remember to upgrade my area to 3G first... Paying the same price for everyone else for edge speeds is getting old.
"75% of the population"? How about a percentage of the LAND AREA. Like 99+%?
The whole POINT of wireless is that you can use it when you're ON THE ROAD, somewhere OUT OF A CITY, or otherwise anywhere but parked at home or the office. The carriers seem to have lost track of that.
Perhaps it's a side-effect of the FCC's abandonment of access requirements to the legacy, subsidized, landline infrastructure, leaving landlines to a duality of incumbent Tellcos and Cable companies, which only have to incrementally upgrade while their no-longer-existent competition must wire the world from scratch? That ends up with wireless data carriage repurposed as a cheaper-to-install alternative to landlines, driving mobile service into secondary status in corporate mindshare. Of course, in such a market the incumbents (like AT&T), with their existing landline structure, have less incentive to roll out service than their wireless-only and wireless-mainly competition.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hmm, I guess I always thought that GSM meant a certain set of frequencies that all GSM phones could use; i.e. the 'GSM' chip was capable of working all GSM frequencies. (I don't know)
Likewise I would assume that any phone labeled as a particular tech would be able to handle that 'entire' techs frequency allocation, such as LTE, but then again I don't know if LTE is analogous to 'GSM' in this way. Is LTE an agreed standard to be implemented by all networks claiming to be LTE or is more the '4G' type of labeling that has no meaning beyond marketing?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If this is false advertising, what is true advertising? Can you think of a single ad out there where the company told the complete and clear truth about a product? Anybody?
Buy Volvos. They’re Boxy (But They’re Good).
Metamucil: We help you go to the toilet so you won’t get cancer and die.
AT&T: You may think phone service stinks since deregulation, but don’t mess with us, because we’re all you’ve got. In fact, if we fold, you’ll have no damn phones. AT&T - We’re tired of taking your crap!
Paramount Pictures: Paramount Pictures presents The Freak. This movie won’t just scare you, it will #$%@ you up for life.
Ahhh...Crazy People
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Frequency bands for GSM are different between what European carriers generally use and what US/Candian carriers use because of previus spectrum allocation. Hence why GSM phones have to support mutilple bands if they want to be useful. This is no different with LTE. There are sets of bands that can be used but an LTE chip is not necessarily required to support them all just as a GSM chip doesn't necessarily have to support all bands. Finally, yes, LTE is an ITU standard.
Knowing AT&T, the NSA will be underwriting their expenses.
4G is any wireless service that provides speeds in the 10+mb range. Regardless of standards bodies or advertising.
Basis...
3G was a 1+ mb service
2G was 100K+ mb service
1st Generation was a 9600bps service.
***
Each generation has been an order of magnitude higher in base speed.
5G should theoretically be in the 100mb range. But I wager that we'll see 4G pushed to about 20-30mb, and 5G will be claimed with a 50mbs. (But at least that will be a 1/2 a magnitude increase).
Not much, in fact, there is almost zero difference between Obama and Romney.
Or "Robamneya"
Comcast told me for about 7 years that broadband was coming to my area (one of the three biggest cities in Connecticut). It finally came, the year I left the state.
Please resign your Slashdot account. You've been entirely too informative and polite to be seen around here. It might catch on and then what would we be? ;-)
Thanks for the explanation!
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Of course HSPA+ is not LTE. Who said it was? This is clearly about AT&T expanding its LTE service not HSPA+. Maybe you should relearn how to read? Also, both LTE and HSPA+ are 'evolved 3G'. LTE-Advanced is actual 4G.
Why would 5G only be 100mbps? That's 1/3 of LTE's theoretical peak download rate. LTE-Advanced, actual 4G by ITU's standard, has theoretical peak down rate of 1gbps.
They should just have modular antennas. If you go to another country or carrier that doesn't support your frequencies/protocols, you can purchase a cheap and standardized antenna module, pop out the old one, and put the new one in. Plug-and-play.
They really should just advertise the theoretical speed (or at least the average speed) like wired internet. Why do I care what frequencies and protocols they are using if they have wide coverage and fast speeds.
AT&T put the 3 gig limit on my unlimited plan AFTER I renewed a contract.
Bye bye AT&T.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
They brought LTE to Davis, CA, but not the much larger Sacramento, a mere 15 minutes away. I can only conclude that someone at AT&T is throwing darts at a map to decide where they'll upgrade that week.
Does anybody believe any of the so-called "benchmarking" speed test web sites?
I almost believe there's a full time team at every major provider of consumer internet access whose job it is to packet shape and/or outright fake every benchmark web site. Even if the motivation isn't to fool people outright (ie, not provide the service level they're charging people) but to just keep every ignoramus out there from hammering customer service about how their speed tests aren't living up to their expectations.
The only speed test I think I trust anymore is an scp of some decently large block of data output from /dev/random and then run through bdes and gzip to eliminate as much compressibility as possible. This just might be enough anti-snooping/anti-shaping to keep you from getting a false result.
Of course, you're not immune from the shaper from identifying you as ssh traffic and dumping you into whatever bucket that traffic goes into, but it least its what kind of throughput you're actually likely to get with run of the mill ssh tunneled traffic. Maybe a real implementation of this would use a home-rolled protocol on random, encrypted-negotiated ports to prevent anything but the "everything else, unknown traffic" shaper bucket.
Did you read what I said. ITUs standard is meaningless. Theoretical peak is meaningless. ITU decided on a whim to make 4G = 1gps. But if you look at the history, in context to the data rate from 1x on word. The base speed was usually around 10x the old generation.
Thus 4G should be 10mbs, and 5G will be 100mbs. The fact that LTE technology could theoretically hit 300mbs is irrelevant. The role out of a 5th generation data service should be 100mbs. And 6th generation should be 1000mbs (or 1gbs).
So they reverted to the very first definition? Pretty sure it was 100MB/s theoretical DL to be true 4G, then they allowed LTE, which at least still has other cool advantages (latency, IPv6), then they allowed HSPA+ (aka crap) to be called 4G, cause the phone companies where calling it that anyway.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
If I was in charge at AT&T, I would spend whatever money it took to improve the 2G/3G coverage of AT&T to the point where its better than Verizon. Lots of people have made "I hate Verizon but dont get coverage from anyone else so I have no choice" complaints, if AT&T fixed that, more people would switch over from Verizon and could move towards making AT&T the #1 carrier in America.
I agree this a sad story but I fail see how you reach your conclusion from it.
I know that I shouldn't be surprised, and in fact I'm not. However, our AT&T rep has been telling us that AT&T would be rolling out LTE in my market "soon" for over a year. According to this map, we're not even on the "soon" list.
We switched to AT&T because they had the iPhone. Apple tech is a big part of our inudstry, and our President and CEO especially are big fans, and they decided that we couldn't do without. At this point though, 90% of our phones have gone out of contract in the past year and a half, and we've held off on upgrading with the assumption that the next iPhone will have LTE technology. Verizon already has excellent LTE service in our area, and I have always felt that they represented better customer service. I really wonder what AT&T can do to keep us from jumping ship. Probably nothing...
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
>HSPA+ proponents rightly said their technology was just as fast as LTE over these blocks
[citation needed]
And doesn't change the fact that UMTS/HSPA sucks tech-wise compared to LTE
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water