Short of Sprint’s WiMax, Verizon LTE has no actual competition to speak of in the 4G market. AT&T and T-Mobile’s “4G” is really just supercharged HSPA+ 3G technology, after all. So the results of PC Mag’s nationwide mobile bandwidth test shouldn’t be much of a surprise: Verizon LTE just mops the floor with the competition.
That’s not going to last though. Here’s why.
AT&T is about to start the process of rolling out their own LTE network and early reports indicate that when it finally lands, it’ll run six times faster than Verizon’s 4G offerings.
Verizon’s got a big head start on AT&T, and it’s not really likely that either carrier will have anything approximating major nationwide coverage of LTE until 2013, which is when I personally think we’ll see the first 4G iPhones and iPads.
When the iPhone and iPad 4G do land, though, expect a similar consumer choice to the one currently facing consumers: Verizon will have the better nationwide 3G coverage, while AT&T will have the faster coverage. The more things change, eh?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
