AT&T Planning to Deploy LTE Mid 2011
AT&T makes up the last of the US carriers to announce plans to launch their “4G-but-not” networks, with T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint already planning to or already having launched HSPA+, LTE, and WiMax, respectively. John Stankey – AT&T’s CEO – tells us that AT&T aims to cover nearly 75-million people by the time 2012 comes around, though they’ll continue to expand their current HSDPA network simultaneously (with 600 new radios coming to one of their problem areas – San Francisco – October 1st.)
They expect to spend $700 million to build their LTE network for the remainder of 2010 alone to get started, and will spend much more than that throughout 2011. They’ll even be upgrading their network to HSPA+ for the many people who won’t be getting a phone with hardware necessary to take advantage of LTE. It may have sounded like AT&T would be lagging behind in this data network upgrade race, but it seems they’ve had their head on straight all this time. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what they’ll do device wise: it’s possible that we may not even see an Android phone to take advantage of HSPA+ or LTE for a long while.
[via Fierce Wireless]