Most United States carriers will be rolling out some flavor of “4G” technology this year except for AT&T which has chosen to wait till 2011 for LTE. AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega thinks there will be a shortage of LTE devices in 2010 and chose to wait till 2011 when they will be widely available.
So how does AT&T fill the gap till next year while all the other carriers beef up their networks? A recent interview with Fierce Broadband Wireless suggest AT&T will follow T-Mobile’s strategy of using HSPA+.
Mr. De la Vega said his company will deploy HSPA+ (which is capable of 21 Mbps) in certain locations, but they are still working out the details on which markets to cover.
If AT&T is holding off on LTE till 2011 for more handsets, does that mean we could see more HSPA+ devices this year? T-Mobile is launching their HSPA+ network tomorrow and expects to have broad national deployment of its faster mobile web by the end of 2010. Their first device is a USB modem, but it is widely expected T-Mobile has a surprise HSPA+ handset to pair with their very fast network.
Is anyone else holding out on 4G data speeds for their next Android handset? Sprint will have a 4G handset this summer, but surely T-Mobile and Verizon have something up their sleeve.
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