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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.
And here is the source since I forgot the link.
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.
"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
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.