Verizon, which is rumored to be launching an LTE network in Q1 2010, gave more information about their planned LTE network yesterday during the company’s earning call. LTE, for the uninitiated, stands for Long Term Evolution and will eventually be branded as 4G by operators around the world. It’s going to offer an insane amount of speed and make it cheaper for operators to offer data to customers. “We plan to conduct LTE trials in Seattle and in Boston later this year” said Chief Financial Officer John Killian. He further added that the company is “working on a commercial launch of LTE service in up to 30 markets next year.” And that in “2011 and 2012, we’ll continue to expand significantly with the ultimate goal being to cover all our POPs [points of presence] with this great product by the end of 2013.” The sad news, that many of you are going to hate me for delivering, is that Verizon expects their LTE network to only offer 8-12 Mbps. A huge disappointment since we’ve been reading things such as “Nokia breaks 173 Mbps during LTE test trial in Germany” since early 2008. What gives Verizon? Are you using come janky ass bootleg Chinese networking equipment to cut down on costs?
Oh and one more bad piece of news: The company plans to ax another 8,000 jobs during the second half of this year. Can you say ouch?
Update: I’m strongly thinking that this PC Mag article has a typo and that the author meant to say 8-12 MBps (megabytes per second) and not Mbps (megabits per second) since 8-12 MBps would equal 64-92 Mbps and that sounds like a much more accurate figure for LTE.
[Via: PC Magazine]