Verizon recently suffered an outage of their 4G LTE network that lasted a little over 24 hours. Not many people complained about it because there are still a limited number of users even utilizing 4G LTE and frankly Verizon’s 3G is fast enough for most basic web surfing tasks. That didn’t stop T-Mobile from taking the opportunity to poke fun at the incident however; in the form of a tweet they say: “In the time your network was out, we downloaded 22 million photos, 17 million eBooks and 1 million apps on our 4G network.” Now we don’t actually know what that means since we’re used to hard numbers such as megabytes and gigabytes, but it’s important to point out that T-Mobile thinks their 4G network can go toe to toe with what Verizon offers. If you’re using a 42 Mbps HSPA+ enabled device and are lucky enough to be in a market that has 42 Mbps HSPA+ coverage then yes, T-Mobile can provide numbers that are comparable to the best of what Verizon has to offer, but right now both operators suffer from a lack of devices that can reap the benefits of their new networks.
Verizon has the HTC Thunderbolt and recently launched Samsung Charge, along with a slew of USB modems and portable hotspots, while T-Mobile has the Samsung Galaxy S 4G … and that’s it. The Samsung only does 21 Mbps HSPA+ anyway, and the likelihood of a 42 Mbps HSPA+ phone coming out by the end of 2011 doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. The same can be said about Verizon however, which uses CDMA for voice and texts, and LTE for data, therefore requiring devices that are thicker than usual and with the magic ability to kill batteries with little effort.
All of this will change in 2012 when Qualcomm releases chips that can handle LTE along with CDMA and hopefully LTE along with 42 Mbps HSPA+. Then there’s the whole T-Mobile and AT&T merger, but don’t get us started on that.