AT&T and Verizon execs tout LTE plans

Computerworld - Technologists from AT&T and Verizon Wireless today outlined their respective company's LTE plans during a Web conference sponsored by the GSM Association. At the end, neither had showed that their firm held a significant advantage over the other.

In fact, Kris Rinne, senior vice president of architecture and planning for AT&T, and Tom Sawanobori, vice president for network strategy at Verizon, mostly touted the LTE technology under development at their firms as superior to the WiMax technology emerging from Clearwire and Sprint Nextel for high speed wireless communications.

The biggest difference in the LTE strategies of Verizon AT&T remains as it has been for a while -- that Verizon plans to come to market sooner with LTE.

Sawanobori restated Verizon's plans, disclosed earlier this month, to bring LTE to 25 to 30 markets with 100 million potential customers by the end of 2010.

Meanwhile, Rinne said today that AT&T plans to launch LTE trials later in 2010, with initial deployments underway some time next year.

She also noted that AT&T is boosting the speeds of its existing 3G networks by upgrading them with HSPA 7.2 technology.

Neither executive today would commit to either a usage-based pricing model or all-you-can eat option like those now offered in some wireless plans, though Sawanobori did predict that Verizon's plan will "probably be usage based."

Rinne and Sawanobori each said that LTE wireless technology will initially let users more smootly run applications for video and gaming more smoothly, and eventually support Voice over IP.

Verizon hopes to start supporting voice traffic over its LTE network in 2011 or 2012, while AT&T expects to join it in 2012. Both carriers will initially rely on their existing wireless networks for voice communications.

Verizon is hoping to convince partners to create many different devices, such as cameras and small medical devices, that can take advantage of the faster speeds available on its LTE network.

The company is encouraging small developers to test their devices on LTE technology at its new LTE Innovation Center in Waltham, Mass., Sawanobori said.

In LTE network tests in Boston and Seattle, Verizon has seen average downlink speeds of 5-12 Mbit/sec, and uplink speeds 2-5 Mbit/sec, about 10 times faster than Verizon's existing 3G network on CDMA/EVDO-Rev. A.

Verizon said it takes about 30 milliseconds for a signal transmitted round trip on its LTE trial networks, about a third the time needed under 3G speeds. Such speeds would improve complex application performance, Sawanobori said.

Sawanobori acknowledged that the cost to operate an LTE network will be about one-third the cost of operating Verizon's current networks, mostly due to technology efficiencies.