LTE - AT&T's And Verizon's New Turf War

AT&T and Verizon have been duking it out lately over 3G download speeds and coverage maps. I suspect the only losers in that fight have been Sprint and T-Mobile which aren't getting near as much memorable coverage on the air or in the news. AT&T is now getting a jump start on taking shots at Verizon in the race to bring LTE to market.According to this Fierce Wireless report, both Verizon and AT&T touted the LTE network at a conference over Clearwire's WiMAX network, which Sprint is tied into. The WiMAX vs. LTE argument centers around which radio frequency you think will outperform the other.

AThe Wall Street Journal is reporting that Verizon is ready to roll out LTE to 25 markets by the end of the year. John Donovan, AT&T Chief Technology Officer, said the technology isn't mature enough yet to be of any particular advantage to Verizon though. Too many glitches yet to be worked out in handsets before it takes advantage of the new network.

Even though Verizon will cover nearly 100 million people with its new network by the end of the year, it admits it won't have any handsets until the middle of 2011. They will, however, have data cards for notebooks which will be able to take advantage of the higher speeds without worrying about some of the shortcomings, like relatively high power drain.

That means no LTE speeds for your phone for over a year, but it gives Verizon bragging rights. I fully expect Verizon to release ads when the networks go live, and I also expect AT&T to counter with their faster data speeds on phones that will be available at the time.

And both carriers will be the winner. I just hope the ads are as creative and enjoyable as their recent salvos have been.