Verizon Wireless may be looking to complete its national LTE mobile broadband coverage roadmap faster than previously imagined, with recent executive comments indicating a completion date by 2014.
As Verizon announced at CTIA, it expects to have two trial LTE markets by the end of this year, with a first commercial launch early in 2010, and 25 to 30 markets live by the end of 2010.
And then this week there was this: "From there we'll build it out in the next two, three years, where we'll have LTE deployed throughout our footprint," Gurnani said in a video interview with Unstrung.
That would indicate full deployment sometime in 2013.
Verizon has been on a roll with its LTE news, starting by naming Alcatel-Lucent, Starent Networks and Ericsson as its 4G suppliers in February at Mobile World Congress. It is perhaps feeling the pressure from Clearwire Corp. and Sprint-Nextel Corp., which have an aggressive time-to-market advantage for WiMAX.
Verizon will be one of the first in the U.S. market with LTE, but won’t be the last. In the United States, AT&T Inc. is planning to deploy in 2011, with Metro PCS saying it will launch LTE in the second half of 2010. And T-Mobile USA’s parent company, T-Mobile, has also said it would go with LTE, skipping interim HSPA upgrades to get a jump on the market.