AT&T plans LTE roll out in 2011, iPhone 4G to follow?

John Brownlee ()

AT&T plans LTE roll out in 2011, iPhone 4G to follow?

Despite widespread criticism of their mobile broadband service and the crushing network demand of millions of iPhone users, AT&T isn’t exactly spending a lot of money beefing up their nationwide 3G coverage… and now they have announced that they’ve just signed deals with Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson to roll-out LTE in 2011.

LTE is to 3G what 3G was to EDGE, theoretically offering transfer rates of between 140 to 300Mbps… and if they want to keep the iPhone as an exclusive, it’s important for AT&T to roll it out before their competitors. In fact, maybe the impending LTE roll out explains why AT&T has been so reticent to beef up their 3G network: they’ve known for awhile that 3G is a dead duck, and all they need to do is keep service good enough to get through the next couple of years until LTE comes.

Or at least that’s what I hope it was. Frankly, AT&T’s handling of its 3G network was of such staggering ineptitude that unless they ignored it on purpose, I have no faith that their LTE roll out will be anything besides a debacle.

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Either way, you can now probably put a firm date on the iPhone 4G: June 2011.

9 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • http://geek.michaelgrace.org/ Mike Grace

    Same here. Sure hope the LTE works much better and if not I hope that Apple finally kicks AT&T in the butt.

  • StarFox

    So you’re saying NO new iPhone in 2010? That doesn’t sound right.

  • Gary

    Theoretical speed doesn’t mean we are going to get that much. I still can’t get over 100Kbps on my iPhone 3GS here in NY.

  • Alfred

    Didn’t Apple report that 55% of it’s earnings last quarter came from *outside* the US? I wonder how long before that approaches 75%, or higher? If so, in a few years it may not matter what AT&T does or does not do. If other major markets (such as Europe and Asia) have LTE well deployed, Apple doesn’t have to wait for AT&T to play catch-up, they can just release their futuristic wonder device, and let the non-US world play with it.

    Remember this already happened with MMS. Will an LTE iPhone or iPad be next?

    In fact, LTE is already commercially available in the Norwegian and Swedish capitals (which started back in December ’09), with many other European capitals running trials. Also Verizon in the US plans to begin LTE roll-out this year.

    So, er…. Verizon, much of Europe, Asia, and even the desert African country of Lybia will be rolling out LTE in 2010 (http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.almadar.ly%2Fnews.aspx%3Fm_id%3D541&sl=auto&tl=en)

    But if you’re in the United States and on AT&T, you have to wait.

    Wow. Just wow.

  • Alfred

    Also remember that AT&T will just *start* to deploy LTE in 2011. It will take several years for the LTE coverage to reach their entire coverage area.

    Verizon says it will take them 3 years to do it, if they start this year.

    So AT&T’s LTE coverage may not be complete until …. 2014, and that’s *if* they do it at the same speed as Verizon claims they can do it. If that’s delayed you may be looking at 2015 or 2016.

    By that time the iPhone will be celebrating it’s 8th or 9th birthday.

  • peter

    i think all of you are confused about the apple iphone 4g…
    apple iphone 4g does not mean support for 4g network’s
    iphone 4g means 4th generation iphone.
    4g network means the above of the new lte technology etc.

    i think people should rename this to apple iphone 4th generation not 4g as many of you readers and publishers are tripping out on networks.
    it will be a couple of years before any of the networks around the world mature to 4G network standard (not iphone 4g)

    i still believe the apple iphone 4th generation is still due 2010 sometime. obviously with support of more 3g networks such as WCDMA 900MHz which was not avail on the iphone 3g and 3gs.

  • Glenn

    AT&T is still deploying EDGE towers. Their 3G coverage doesn’t even extend to 10% of the EDGE coverage area. Now they’re going to deploy ANOTHER technology, LTE, in “select cities”, probably in one Florida and one in California, and call it “nationwide”.

  • Plummer

    They will deploy one tower in Orlando, and another tower in Seattle, and call it “coverage from coast to coast”.

  • Plummer

    “4th Generation” iPhone is not the same as “4G Network”. This place is filled with more (context-ignorant) retards than the Special Olympics.