AT&T all set to expand its 4G LTE network

May 252011
 

AT&T is gearing up to launch 4G LTE services in five markets namely Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio as confirmed by a press release, this morning. The LTE services in these five cities will begin as early as this summer. AT&T has plans to extend its service to ten more cities (AT&T has not disclosed the names of these cities) by second half of the year with plans to reach the 70 million users mark by year end. AT&T has so far invested $75 billion in the wireless and wired networks over the last four years and they further plan to invest another $19 million to strengthen their network in order to gain more customers and hence more market share.

Not only this AT&T has also stated in its press release that it will be adding around 20 devices to its arsenal but it is still unclear whether all of them will be capable of running on its 4G LTE network. AT&T is trying to catch up to its rival Verizon Wireless which still claims market supremacy. Verizon had been quite quick in building its 4G LTE network  (spread over 38 markets) and managed to grab the early and largest pie of the market but AT&T is planning to catch up to its rival and plans to get full deployment by the year 2013.

Here is a list of devices that support 4G

  • HTC Sensation 4G, HTC Inspire 4G, HTC Thunderbolt 4G,HTC Evo 4G,
  • Samsung Infuse 4G, Samsung Galaxy S 4G, Samsung Droid Charge, Samsung Epic 4G
  • Motoroal Atrix 4G
  • HP Veer 4G
  • Samsung Galaxy Tab 4G, Blackberry Playbook 4G, HTC Max 4G

@TMobile Getting Ready for 2011 Tablets Running on 4G (HSPA+)

Dec 102010
 

According to T-Mobile they are getting ready to release Tablets which are capable with 4G (HSPA+)

“T-Mobile is working closely with the majority of our OEM partners to deliver 4G products by integrating HSPA+ into roadmaps in 2011 as the dominant global standard.  Consumers will continue to see HSPA+ fuel future innovation in a variety of mobile consumer electronics from smartphones and tablets to emerging devices. T-Mobile will continue to be at the forefront of wireless innovation, delivering an aggressive 4G product lineup in 2011, including 4G tablets.”

That’s all nice and dandy all I really care is what’s the data limit on that thing is going to be?

Which carrier is going to be first to unlock the bandwidth to Unlimited Data and not pay more than $50 that’s my concern.

See with 4G network you could use the 5GB in about 32 minutes and your $50+ bucks is gone! and if you want extra you will pay $10 per GB after. I mean reality is that you can watch maybe 4-8 videos online and your 5GB are already used up.

Having any kind of tablet nowadays is expensive, hope that bandwidth and tablets demand will increase while the prices will decrease by Q2 of 2011.

Well from rumors I ready just about 15 minutes ago, looks like Motorola will be the first to come up with Tablet that has Tegra 2, capable with: 4G, HSPA+, LTE (Or whatever they call it) and Android 3.0 Honeycomb,

Now that’s going to be one sweet a$$ tablet!

Exclusive LG Android Phone for Verizon LTE

Oct 252010
 

An unknown source forwarded the picture of upcoming LG android phone to Engadget. The image is informing many things to understand. The LTE logo towards the bottom of the back is quite significant to observe. This is reminding us all the earlier Verizon words intimating that six-odd LTE phones are slated to release next year. Definitely this exclusive LG Android phone could be one among the mentioned six phones.

There is another thing clearly witnessed from the image and that is a HD camera and perhaps this could be 720p or 1080p in order to match the upcoming requirements of a smartphone. The size and shape is indicating the huge mirrored display for the smartphone, which is a significant feature front-facing cam. Also it is hard to ignore the Wi-Fi logo on the back, though it is possible for anyone to create such things. The logo that is seen quite significantly perhaps belongs to DLNA, as we all knew that LG is famous for DLNA player. Recent LG Optimus adorned with this Play To Service.

Via Engadget

ITU Released Press Release about 4G Technologies

Oct 212010
 

Suddenly entire smartphones world is buzzing with words 3G, 4G, WiMax. LTE, and many more. It is true still many people are quite clueless about the differences between each term with the other. Now, UN’s ITU took the liberty to come little forward and to detail more about the 4G technology. Also, the press release kept many secrets about these terminologies in detail. Now, it is the time to carriers to go through these details.

Press Release

ITU paves way for next-generation 4G mobile technologies

ITU-R IMT-Advanced 4G standards to usher new era of mobile broadband communications

Geneva, 21 October 2010 – ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has completed the assessment of six candidate submissions for the global 4G mobile wireless broadband technology, otherwise known as IMT-Advanced. Harmonization among these proposals has resulted in two technologies, “LTE-Advanced1″ and “WirelessMAN-Advanced2″ being accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced, qualifying them as true 4G technologies.

In its recent meeting in Chongqing, China, ITU-R Working Party 5D, which is charged with defining the IMT-Advanced global 4G technologies, reached a milestone in its work by deciding on these technologies for the first release of IMT-Advanced. In the ITU-R Report, which will be published shortly, the LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced technologies were each determined to have successfully met all of the criteria established by ITU-R for the first release of IMT-Advanced. The Report is expected to be approved by ITU Member States at the ITU-R Study Group 5 meeting in Geneva in late November 2010.

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré said, “ICTs and broadband networks have become vital national infrastructure – similar to transport, energy and water networks – but with an impact that promises to be even more powerful and far-reaching. These key enhancements in wireless broadband can drive social and economic development, and accelerate progress towards achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs.”

“While the goals set for IMT-Advanced were considered by some to be very high, I am very pleased to see that all stakeholders in the mobile wireless industry have risen to meet the challenge,” said Valery Timofeev, Director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, in expressing his appreciation for this worldwide effort. “I look forward to the ITU-R Recommendation for IMT-Advanced that will have a profound effect on the development of state-of-the-art technologies for 4G mobile broadband.”

Following the success of the ITU-defined IMT-2000 (3G) systems, ITU-R launched the IMT-Advanced (4G) initiative with its strategic IMT future vision in 2002. It subsequently established the services, spectrum and performance requirements for IMT-Advanced as well as a detailed evaluation process. In an on-going partnership with the industry, the six proposals received by ITU in October 2009 were individually subjected to a rigorous assessment, supported by the work of independent external evaluation groups that had been established around the world. Industry consensus and harmonization fostered by ITU-R among these six proposals have resulted in the consolidation of the proposals into the two agreed IMT-Advanced technologies. These technologies will now move into the final stage of the IMT-Advanced process, which provides for the development in early 2012 of an ITU-R Recommendation specifying the in-depth technical standards for these radio technologies.

IMT-Advanced (4G) provides a global platform on which to build the next-generations of interactive mobile services that will provide faster data access, enhanced roaming capabilities, unified messaging and broadband multimedia.

Stephen Blust, Director of Radio Standards, AT&T, and Chairman of the ITU-R Working Party 5D, also expressed his thanks to all the contributors in industry, government and ITU who have made the IMT-Advanced process successful.

The close partnership between ITU-R members and the global wireless industry in the work on IMT-Advanced clearly establishes these technologies as the pre-eminent ITU-sanctioned 4G mobile wireless broadband solution for information, communications and entertainment.

A layman’s perspective of the IMT-Advanced process and plan can be found here:
www.itu.int/itunews/manager/display.asp?lang=en&year=2008&issue=10&ipage=39&ext=html

Sprint Readies WiMax in NYC , LA and San Francisco

Oct 182010
 

Sprint and Clearwire together are offering WiMax services to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The service is already operational readiness and dates are to be announced for its release. Now, those dates are also announced for the mentioned three places for full consumer availability of the service.

According to Clearwire and Sprint, New York will start receiving the WiMax services from November 1st, Los Angeles from December 1st and San Francisco will get it by the end of December. Actually this service is supposed to offer 5Mbps to 7Mbps download and 1.2Mbps upload speeds. Here, the bigger cities crush should be seriously taken into consideration about these speeds. Also, there is a rumor that Verizon is also coming up with its LTE network in these cities at about the same time.

4G Wireless –A detailed Report

Oct 112010
 

4G or the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards is to provide high-speed transmission, which can support high-quality streaming video. In fact, these 4G technologies include mobile WiMax and LTE. Importantly, this 4G is not backward-compatible with 3G, but uses spectrum more efficiently.

Today smartphones are seen using for internet accessing and data transmission much widely. This situation is created a huge demand for reliable wireless data networks with wide coverage from the carriers. Currently, we are experiencing the 3G network technologies for this purpose, which is a ten years old for us. Now, the trend is 4G networks and this can offer fast and effective broadband services for smartphones.

This 4G network is comprises of two main technologies and those are WiMax and LTE. Here, WiMax is a wide-area standard from the IEEE. LTE is the latest standard from the 3GPP, an industry group that brought out the earlier 3G networking technologies.

Advanced antenna technologies are the major backbone for this WiMax and LTE for the proper reception and effective performance. Here, each one uses different parts of the wireless spectrum for the effective working. Importantly, neither will operate at current frequencies, and neither natively supports voice transmission. This is indicating a necessity for the smartphone to utilize a 3G chip to have voice calls successfully and also will enable roaming between carriers and geographic areas.

Currently Sprint is the only carrier offering 4G service in the U.S. For this, Sprint uses WiMax technology on the Android-based HTC EVO 4G and Samsung Epic 4G phones. Verizon wireless has said that it expects to ship LTE phones by mid-2011.

Today a provider is privileged to avail different 4G technologies, but this will be provided four to 10 times the throughput of 3G networks. This facility can improve the faster downloads and streaming of videos and 4G will result as a great boon for this purpose. Through this some of the apps that demand improved performance for video, chat, videoconferencing, MMS, gaming and HDTV will benefit more through these 4G services.

Soon home broadband services also will see the replacement with this 4G service. The WiMax 4G service will become cheaper and affordable than the home broadband along with a 3G wireless plan. This 4G service can facilitate a download speed of 100Mbit/sec.

4G: Who’s Got What?
4G service is currently available in several countries. Japan, Korea and Russia have WiMax networks, and a commercial LTE network is running in Sweden. Here’s a rundown of 4G plans in the U.S.
AT&T Inc. plans to use LTE when it eventually upgrades to 4G in 2011, but for now it’s sticking with its current 3G network.
Verizon Wireless is testing LTE equipment from several vendors, and it plans to begin rolling out 4G this year and to cover most of the country by 2012. The company hasn’t announced LTE pricing.
Sprint is partnering with Clearwire Corp. to offer WiMax-based 4G service in nearly 50 major U.S. markets. Clearwire/Sprint’s 4G plans typically include unlimited data access, whereas most 3G plans charge extra for downloading more than 5GB per month. Clearwire-based plans are commonly $10 to $20 per month cheaper than 3G data plans. Clearwire recently announced an effort to roll out and test systems that incorporate both LTE and WiMax technologies.
T-Mobile USA is launching a 3G variant (sometimes called 3.5G) in 100 U.S. cities. The carrier is expected to offer LTE services sometime in the future, but it has not set a specific date for doing so.
MetroPCS Communications Inc. plans to introduce LTE in Las Vegas before 2011 using a dual-mode 3G/LTE phone by Samsung.
U.S. Cellular will probably use LTE when it offers 4G service, but it hasn’t announced a schedule for doing so.
Sources: News reports, GigaOm.com and PC World

Via Computerworld

Apple’s Fifth-gen iPhone Perhaps Will Come with Dual Model GSM/CDMA

Oct 112010
 

Apple’s fifth-gen iPhone will have the capacity to run on networks that are based on two of the world’s popular 3G wireless standards. This capacity will forfeit the chances of support for the faster 4G networks that are currently available. This is according a latest report.

Already many rumors are indicating that the Apple’s next iPhone revision will target to run on both CDMA and GSM networks. This is currently possible through a dual-mode Qualcomm baseband chip. But, these capabilities will not let the iPhone to support the LTE (long Term Evolution) networks and this is other name for the 4G networks.

This kind of situation is indicating that the Apple will bypass the first generation of power-hungry and potentially problematic LTE based controllers in favor of boosting its efforts around proprietary technologies like FaceTime. Also, the situation will keep the 4G network support waiting until 2012.

This kind of approach from Apple will permit the iPhone to run on AT&T’s robust 2.5G EDGE network rather than the available faster 3G networks.

In this context a report says that “Apple simply doesn’t want to be the guinea pig on new LTE networks that aren’t ready for primetime, and Steve Jobs knows not to trust the hype that’s spewed by the carriers on 4G. The truth is that 3G networks have many more years of life, and the transition to LTE will be much slower than the carrier want you to believe (LTE doesn’t even have its voice standard fleshed out yet)”.

It’s for these reasons, the report adds as “AT&T has been upgrading its network for broader support of the faster, HSPA+–or so called 3.5G—standard while Verizon has been working to implement an enhancement to the CDMA standard that will let future devices transmit both data and voice communications simultaneously”.

Via appleinsider

Verizon 4G Service Will be Ready Soon, Says the Latest Teaser Page

Sep 212010
 

Verizon recently released a teaser page and it says “How would you like a full-tilt wireless experience”? This teaser page is for its upcoming LTE-based network. Do not look for more as this teaser page cannot provide any details about launch date, launch markets, and hardware. Verizon is seriously gathering the email addresses of the interested individuals promising them intimation about the availability of the much awaited service. There are already many big players participating in the 4G race and soon everyone will come to know whose services are up to the mark. The current teaser page from Verizon is truly impressive and many enthusiasts are really expecting more from this newly introducing service. Let us wait and see until the veil is lifted completely.

Via Engadget