AT&T issued a press release today saying that the company was going to roll out LTE in 5 cities by the summer, namely Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio. Additionally, AT&T will add LTE to another 10 cities by the end of the year.
Although I'm very excited AT&T is deploying LTE in more cities, we iPhone users will most likely not be able to enjoy this technology for a while, as it was reported the iPhone won't support LTE until 2012...
Stacey Higginbotham got a tour of AT&T's Foundry space in Plano, Texas on Wednesday. Not only did the GigaOM author get to rub elbows with the carrier's SVP of application and service infrastructure John Summers, she also got to witness their LTE in action.
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and has been a popular choice for 4th generation technology among wireless carriers. Verizon deployed their LTE service late last year, and other than a few hiccups, the service has been widely popular. So how will AT&T stack up?
Following other reports that Apple won't introduce an LTE-enabled iPhone until at least 2012, Digitimes has chimed in to affirm that there won't be an iPhone introduced with 4G speeds this year.
Besides the fact that Apple stated it wasn't planning on LTE adoption in the near future, the industry has indicated that bringing 4G to the iPhone simply isn't feasible right now. After the fifth generation iPhone is released this fall, it is expected that the sixth generation iPhone will have LTE support in 2012.
Recent rumors have said that Apple won't be releasing the iPhone 5 at WWDC in June. TechCrunch reported that iOS 5's release will be pushed back to the fall, and that we won't see any hardware announcements from Apple this summer.
If this report is true, this year will look very different for Apple. The company's product cycle has always been fairly predictable, but circumstances surrounding the iPhone point to an unusual set of releases this year.
Specifically, consensus seems to be that LTE could be playing a role in Apple's decisions surrounding the next iPhone...
Well, no one saw that coming. Out of nowhere, AT&T has bought T-Mobile and become the largest wireless provider in the U.S.
It was originally thought that Sprint and T-Mobile would merge, but network incompatibilities made that idea look less and less attractive. Instead, AT&T and T-Mobile have shacked up to become the big kid on the block. Combined, AT&T and T-Mobile account for 130 million wireless customers in the United States, blowing by Verizon's 90 million users.
The question on our mind is: What does this all mean for the iPhone? LTE? What if we actually start getting reception in our own homes...
Following Verizon Wireless CEO, Dan Mead's remarks regarding the short lines on Verizon's iPhone 4 launch day, Mead also indicated that Apple will eventually offer mobile products that can use Verizon's Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G network.
This lines up perfectly with the speculation earlier this month that Apple was working on an LTE iPhone...