In a speech delivered at the 4G Executive Summit yesterday, AT&T Mobility Vice-President of Network Architecture Hank Kafka stated that the carrier will depend on its HSPA network for mobile broadband for the foreseeable future while playing up the forthcoming upgrades to HSPA+ and the apparent advantages of its GSM based infrastructure while remaining confident about the availability of LTE in five years, stating surprise if the opposite situation were to transpire.
When asked about competitors to LTE such as WiMax, the Vice President did not offer conclusive answers in regards to network generation classification and went as far to dismiss the competing standard as a niche technology, marketing hype, and not resembling an actual 4G network, placing emphasis on the lack of ratified 4G standards by the ITU, and the claimed advantages that HSPA has over WiMax in terms of cost and speed in comparison.
This makes since for them because there 3g is already faster than CDMA 3g, the question becomes what is vzw going to do
Keep in mind however that AT&T’s 3G is slower overall in many locations, due to the network being overloaded at the local-loop level. Putting it simply, AT&T is not supplying enough bandwidth to many of their towers. This has resulted in multiple class-action lawsuits.
I suspect AT&T doesn’t have the national bandwidth to deploy LTE, and has not been planning on the level that Sprint has with XOHM, for the necessary rollout of the bandwidth. We noted Sprint’s partnerships with companies like Google, in order to obtain the necessary dark fiber, which will be needed to string together WiMAX and LTE deployments nationally.
In short, yes, you are correct… but that simply means that AT&T is having to fix their own problems for much longer than anyone initially expected.
I saw somewhere that att’s HSPA was getting faster download/upload times than CDMA’s DOrA in the U.S. I ask mostly because there have been no announcements about what vzw is doing with thier LTE plans
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