AT&T Will Spent $19 Bn Next Year To Improve Their 3G Network

John Brownlee ()

AT&T Will Spent $19 Bn Next Year To Improve Their 3G Network

AT&T’s beleaguered and spotty 3G network has been the butt of both joke and collective outrage since the iPhone 3G, but Ma Bell is now promising customers that they’re serious about improving things, having dedicated a minimum of $18 billion to improve both wireless and landline network capacity across the country next year.

Not only will this entail infrastructure support, but according to AT&T, they will also install thousands of new cell sites which will expand mobile broadband coverage to millions of customers whose iPhones might currently cling tenuously to the bottom bar of reception. Additionally, AT&T is making noises that they will be increasing the capacity of their data network, hopefully leading to better download speeds at all… or at least not letting them degrade any further.

The money’s also earmarked for moving AT&T along to the next generation of mobile broadband: the blistering LTE 4G standard. AT&T is promising these network enhancements will allow seamless migration to next-gen LTE… good news indeed, if you are just counting down the days to an iPhone LTE announcement.

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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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  • Mark Gary Blumenthal, MD, MPH

    The only reason I have not yet purchased an iPhone is because AT&T’s products and service suck. If AT&T means what they say and says what they mean (which would be a radical first for them), I may not have to wait until Apple and Verizon make love. Given AT&T’s history, I am not holding my breath.

  • Allan

    “Will Spent”?

  • Pam

    AT&T: Too little, too late. When Apple selects another carrier I am gone. I have had an iPhone for 4 years and still have yet to get reception in my house. My Verizon friends have not problem.

  • Juan

    Okay, let me see if I got this-so the last 4-5 years of iPhone’s exitence and now you want to improve your service? Are you kidding? Really? How about doing what you promised the first time when you first introduced the phone, but I guess driving around in Bentley’s and flying in private jets to aspen was more important than fixing your crappy service. Nice job jerk offs.

  • Sam

    The iPhone has only been on the market for three years.

  • Glenn

    AT&T is supposed to launch 4G/LTE next year as well, so they will have THREE technologies to deal with: EDGE, 3G, and 4G/LTE, not one of which covers the entire occupied land area of the US.

  • Maxx Wyler

    don’t they say this every year?