Rural Wireless Coverage Overview: Part I
16/09/11 18:43 Filed in: Wireless Carriers | Roaming
Expanding LTE coverage to rural America keeps hitting the headlines as one of the justification for AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile. AT&T’s point about rural coverage raises many questions about wireless service today including who actually provides it and what types of service exist? A review of the major national coverage maps from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint would lead one to believe that in one form or another national coverage has already been achieved. Behind these marketing machinations lies a different and more convoluted truth.
(AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel respectively) Read More...
(AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel respectively) Read More...
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The Limitations of AT&T's LTE Launch
15/09/11 17:54 Filed in: LTE | Wireless Carriers
It has been widely reported that AT&T Wireless will launch the five LTE markets on Sunday September 18th but it most likely won't compare to Verizon's LTE 4G network. AT&T's desires to purchase T-Mobile largely comes from the need to gain access to the company's AWS spectrum. The additional spectrum will augment AT&T's existing AWS and 700 Mhz holdings to bolster a nationwide LTE deployment and provide the spectrum necessary to compete with Verizon's 22 Mhz LTE deployment. Without the additional spectrum AT&T faces both maximum throughput limitations as well as capacity constraints. Even if T-Mobile's spectrum became available today AT&T won't benefit for months or years while they wait to clear the spectrum of T-Mobile's HSPA+ customers as well as the arrival of multi band carrier aggregation needed to bond the AWS and 700 MHz frequencies. In the near term AT&T's advantage comes from the ability to fall back to the HSPA+ network and its higher speeds compared to Verizon's CDMA EVDO Rev A network. Read More...