AT&T Senior Vice President of Architecture and Planning Kris Rinne recently shed some light on the operator’s LTE plans at the “4G World” conference currently taking place in Chicago. First thing to note is that AT&T will be using both the 700 MHz frequency and AWS bands to deploy their next generation network. That’s a huge contrast to Verizon, who won the 700 MHz auction a few years back and plans on solely using the more favorable 700 MHz band. AWS is what T-Mobile uses for their current HSPA+ network, so it’ll be interesting to see if they can some how form a partnership. AT&T is also saying that they’re going to spend roughly $700 million this year just to prepare their network for the impending upgrade to LTE, but what exactly that money will be spent on wasn’t made clear. Most likely upgraded backhaul. Of great disappointment was the operator’s newly announced goal of covering between 70 to 75 million people with LTE by the end of 2011. Contrast that to Verizon who said that they plan on covering 110 million people by the end of this year.
What about LTE phones? AT&T says that voice enabled LTE devices will hit the market in the second half of 2011 and that they’ll use Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) technology. We’ve covered that in the past, and noted how it was inferior to VoLGA since getting text messages and phone calls will automatically kick you off the LTE network and put you back on 3G or even 2G. AT&T will switch to Voice over LTE in 2013 once their network covers more people, and standards have been made around the technology. In other words, they’re waiting to see how other operators around the world deploy voice and SMS over LTE, let them come up with the best implementation, and then steal it for themselves. A wise strategy.
And finally there’s speed. How fast will their network be. All Kris said was: “I think we’ll be very competitive with what you’ve seen from our competitors, but we haven’t disclosed what the speeds will be.”