AT&T today issued a press release announcing the impending launch of its LTE network in five markets this Summer – Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Antonio. Following that, AT&T has plans to add on another 10 cities during the second half of 2011 with the ultimate goal to provide LTE coverage to 70 million Americans before 2012.
We’ve invested $75 billion in our wireless and wired networks over the last four years – more capital invested in the U.S. than any company in any industry. And we plan to invest $19 billion in our wireless and wireline networks and other capital projects this year. The investments we’ve made to evolve our mobile broadband network in recent years, plus what we have planned for the future, put our customers in position to benefit fully from a host of coming mobile broadband innovations.
There have of course been debates regarding whether or not the next-gen iPhone would support LTE, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Tim Cook recently stated that the chipsets required for LTE would have forced Apple to make design compromises it wasn’t comfortable with. Moreover, LTE is power hungry and battery life is an area where Apple is not willing to compromise on either.
Remember, Apple is about intuitive software running on world class hardware. It’s never been keen on employing a technology or standard just because it’s the latest and greatest. To wit, the original iPhone worked only on Edge despite the rising prevalence of 3G at the time. Apple is undeniably comfortable biding its time.
May 25th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Hmm, so AT&T is only 30+ markets behind Verizon, typical. They wasted their time with HSPA+, but again, typical AT&T. The apologetics behind the rationalization that Apple can’t make an LTE phone is pretty comical and deep into fanboyism. Regarding the source it makes sense.