The 4G wireless wars are in full swing. On Thursday, Verizon Wireless said its LTE network will be in place in 30 U.S. cities by the end of 2010, and an AT&T executive recently said its 4G LTE network will be launched by the middle of next year. Sprint Nextel has also been building out its 4G network, using the rival WiMAX technology.
According to news reports, enterprise IT managers at a meeting in Maryland were told by Verizon senior sales executive Bernie McMonagle that his company intends to have its 4G wireless network in place in 30 National Football League cities, with the rest of the country by 2013. AT&T Operations CEO John Stankey recently told a communications conference that his company is getting its LTE network ready for launch. AT&T trials are currently under way in Baltimore and Dallas.
Verizon’s 700-MHz Band
In the initial rollout, Verizon’s 4G network is expected to have download speeds of five to 12 megabits per second, upload speeds of two to five Mbps, and very low latency. In a later phase, those speeds are expected to be increased. AT&T’s network is expected to have comparable performance.
4G, with its very-high-speed transmission, will allow wireless devices to more easily handle bandwidth-intensive files and apps, including movies, medical imagery, and collaborative games. There’s also discussion that this jump in bandwidth could provide a similar boost to nascent technologies such as traffic sensors, appliances with embedded intelligence, and smart electrical grids.
At the Maryland meeting on Sept. 15, Verizon presented a live demo of seven simultaneous, broadcast-quality video feeds running wirelessly on one laptop, with switching between feeds. But real-world network performance, with a huge number of devices and concurrent transmissions, will be another story.
The Verizon rollout utilizes the 700-MHz spectrum it licensed in the auction conducted by the Federal…