Verizon completes initial 4G wireless test
Verizon Wireless announced Friday that it has completed initial testing of its 4G wireless service in Boston and Seattle.
Using a new technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE), Verizon was successfully able to complete data calls in Boston and Seattle, the first two cities where the company will deploy its service. Verizon is using the 700 MHz spectrum it bought an FCC auction to build the network. The company plans to start offering the service commercially in 2010, providing service for up to 100 million people in 30 markets. The company plans to have the entire nation covered with 4G service in 2013.
As part of this initial test, Boston and Seattle each have 10 LTE 4G cell sites up and running on the 700 MHz spectrum. Verizon selected these markets because of their geographic configuration of suburban and urban areas as well as the areas' high-technology population.
The LTE technology promises to be much faster than current 3G technology and the company expects to deliver services 15 to 100 times faster than these other wireless networks. The actual speeds of the technology have yet to be seen.
Verizon will be competing with Clearwire and its partners, which are already rolling out commercial service for their 4G wireless network that uses a technology called WiMax. Like LTE, WiMax also greatly improves wireless transmission speeds. Clearwire has already launched its service in Atlanta, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Portland, Ore. And it will add another 10 markets in the next couple of months.
Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which invested in Clearwire, will be reselling the service in their cable territories. Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel, which is also a Clearwire partner, is already reselling the service along with its own 3G wireless service throughout the Clearwire territory.
Verizon first mentioned Boston and Seattle as the first two cities to get LTE during its quarterly conference call with investors in July. So far, the company hasn't said much about how the LTE service will be sold and priced. Currently, Verizon offers 3G wireless using a technology called EV-DO. That service is about $60 per month for up to 5GB of data per month.
The Clear WiMax service from Clearwire starts at $20 per month for in-home wireless broadband. And its mobile Internet plans start at $40 per month. Customers can also get a day pass for $10. The company also allows customers to add voice service to their in-home package for $25 per month.
Marguerite Reardon has been a CNET News reporter since 2004, covering cell phone services, broadband, citywide Wi-Fi, the Net neutrality debate, as well as the ongoing consolidation of the phone companies. E-mail Maggie. 
I find that hard to believe.
Is their 4G going to be just as difficult to put in a home or office building?
and how much throttling are they going to do to cap you.
can't be any worse than sprint or clearwire.
Nevermind the fact that they're supposed to get these speeds to a small portable device. The hilarious part is that since the standard was seemingly arbitrarily defined to be 100-200 times faster than any current mobile hardware, this LTE service doesn't qualify as 4g. Nevermind that it's good for 100 megs or so, it's technically only "3.9g" since it doesn't meet the specs somebody defined.
If you could realistically deploy a 100 meg, or even 40 or 50 meg service everywhere, I'm pretty sure most people would consider that "4g" since in the real world they're probably not seeing much more than 1. I hope this isn't a case where better is the enemy of good.
From a technology perspective, 100 mbps downloads is "easily" achievable, meaning numerous providers & manufacturers have already tested production-ready systems at that speed and beyond. Two years ago NTT DoCoMo successfully tested a mobile chip capable of 200 mbps downloads while consuming just 0.1W of power.
So the questions are more from the business / economics / operational perspectives. No one really has a good financial models on this conversion to 3G LTE / 4G technologies. Providers are being pressured to do so because they don't want to lose customers to competitors. But they don't want to invest so much money in the conversion just to keep their current market share.
whoa whoa, slow down there buddy. ever hear of something called "latency"?
Remember modems used to be stuck at marginal speeds... 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k... then for years it looked like 56 kbps was going to be the limit for awhile unless everyone invests ISDN. Suddenly ADSL and cable modem became reality and we warped ahead to multi-megabit speeds almost overnight.
In wireless with technologies like MIMO and OFDMA we're looking at another big leap forward.
Oi.
Believe it. Verizon distinguishes themselves by not, in general, making promises they don't keep when it comes to technology rollouts.
"...I think ATT will be about the same time frame and will test it more..."
You have no idea what you're talking about. Here is the real story:
1) ATT's _current_ 3G network is nowhere near as built-out as Verizon's is, ATT are desperately working on getting broader 3G coverage, and trying to migrate older cellsites using slower technology (GPRS, EDGE) to faster (UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA) capability. (FYI: the original iPhone couldn't even do 3G data - it was stuck on slow EDGE data - not because of a lack of UMTS/HSDPA technology to put in the device, but because quite simply, ATT had no network to support it)
2) Verizon long ago made a complete transition to EVDO, and more recently EVDO-RevA, which in terms of performance is equivalent to the slower-to-medium speed versions of HSDPA. This is why their 3G coverage and performance is superior to ATT's at the present time, on average. (some ATT areas that have HSDPA or HSUPA may outperform local Verizon infrastructure, but on a market-by-market basis, ATT is way behind.)
3) Verizon has traditionally been committed to the CDMA air interface (otherwise known as IS-95, CDMA2000, or IS-2000), but as the marketshare of CDMA drops worldwide, Verizon needs to migrate to a more well-supported standard. (Not least because many cellular devices these days either come out first in GSM, or never become available in CDMA versions at all. Verizon can no longer expect that a device maker will produce a device which they can only sell in relatively large quantities to one carrier worldwide.)
4) Verizon has chosen LTE as that standard, putting them on track to have the earliest large-scale LTE deployment in the world. Since LTE is also a natural technology progression for most major GSM providers, this puts Verizon on track to A) benefit from the most popular cellular devices available, B) leapfrog most of their North-American GSM competitors by deploying a large-scale, next-generation LTE network before anyone else. ATT is too entrenched trying to finish their 3G/3.5G network to start all over with LTE right away. Publicly disclosed network roadmaps bear this out.
Given that Verizon is going to lose a good bit of device exclusivity once they migrate to the same air-interface that their GSM competitors are using (ie ATT, T-Mobile in the USA), one thing they can do to distinguish themselves is by building-out that 4G network before anyone else - which is what they're doing. They are also going to sell "bridge" devices capable of seamlessly handing-off a CDMA session to LTE and back again - since these sorts of technology transitions don't happen overnight. (takes a long time to get all your customers moved onto a new generation of hardware, for one thing)
Everybody knows what this means... GOODBYE AT&T!!!
- by clynx August 16, 2009 4:39 AM PDT
- Data caps = censorship. This is a waist of my attention if they are planning on capping and forcing me to be a meter reader.
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