All Articles Tagged 4g

A few weeks back we mentioned a little blurb about 4G and when we may start to see it. Even though AT&T announced its decision to deploy Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology for its 4G network, they are confident they can get more life from their 3G network by tweaking it, and in doing so give them more time to perfect their future network. (I know what you are thinking… maybe they should have taken more time to perfect their current network!)

Yesterday at the 4G Executive Summit in Chicago, AT&T’s VP of Architecture Hank Kafka spoke out and put to rest any perceived urgency on the part of the carrier to push out a 4G network saying:

The introduction of the 3G iPhone at AT&T Mobility has made a huge impact in showing people how to use handsets to connect to the Internet, but it’s just the beginning of wireless broadband. Now we’re on the verge of that creativity being unleashed.

Kafka said he’d be surprised if LTE wasn’t available “within five years”. And within those 5 years, AT&T “has a lot of runway left with HSPA and HSPA-plus.” We can only hope.

So please, I beg of you, unleash that creativity on us all. I’m sure we are all ready for it.

[Via AppleInsider]

Yesterday at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia XVII conference, AT&T’s chief technical officer John Donovan stated that iPhone 3G users have used much less data on the network than expected.

No explanation was given, but aren’t the reasons pretty obvious? All of the connection issues along with 3G reverting over to the Edge network is what I’m guessing. Donovan later went on to say that the iPhone’s 3g data usage is still “relatively higher than any other phone on the network”. He also went so far as to downplay that AT&T just may have underestimated the network demand following the iPhone 3G launch on July 11th. He did say that improvements made since then were all planned to help meet the anticipated demand. Sorry folks, I’m not buying that one. How about you?

The last good bit of information came regarding AT&T’s plans for 4G: it’s coming and testing will begin sometime in “2010″ with the service following soon there after. AT&T will be not be the first to toy with 4G but rather “leave early adoption to other companies”. (Namely Verizon who has slated launch of their 4G network the same year.)

(Via Electronista.com)