The Race to LTE: A Modern Day Tortoise vs. Hare

While AT&T and Verizon Wireless are both opting for LTE over WiMAX, each has a different strategy to combat the 4G competition. In fact, it reminds me of the tortoise and the hare. As the rabbit, VZW is simply moving their 4G time-table up as quickly as they can because their EV-DO Rev. A technology is maxxed out. They could transition to Rev. B but by the time they even got that going in a meaningful, it would be time to start re-transitioning to LTE.

AT&T’s approach is more of the slow and steady approach and they can afford to do that because their HSPA network still has speed to burn. Although real-world usage will likely be half of the maximum throughput, the carrier is testing speeds up to 7.2 Mbps in Chicago now. Even at half-speed, accounting for overhead and other issues, 3.6 Mbps is close to what WiMAX offers now. If nothing else, it’s comparable enough and can probably be rolled out nationwide quicker than WiMAX.

I’m making that premise based on something I was told by a Sprint representative at the Baltimore WiMAX launch. I asked if overall bandwidth would suffer in places where WiMAX and EV-DO were both offered. I was told no, because he WiMAX backhaul, or the connection from the tower to the web, was separate from Sprint’s EV-DO backhaul. That means AT&T has a potential competitive advantage in rolling out faster HSPA services: their existing towers have the wired connections to the web that can be leveraged quicker. Even at the pace of a tortoise.