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