NEW YORK – Verizon Wireless expects to begin launching its next-generation Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network in select markets by the end of this year, a senior executive says.
In an interview with the wireless news site Unstrung, Roger Gurnai, Verizon’s senior vice president of product development, said the carrier plans to launch LTE in a few select markets later this year and in “30 or so” additional markets next year. The carrier hopes to have the network rolled out nationwide by 2014.
LTE is described as a “proto-4G” network because, as Unstrung notes, the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union has yet to define “4G,” making it unclear what standards networks will have to meet to get that coveted label, which stands for fourth generation. (The “3G” in iPhone 3G, by contrast, stands for third-generation.)
Either way, the new network would be much faster than what is currently available from Verizon and its competitors.
“Verizon will be one of the first operators in the world to deploy LTE and will get to the mobile broadband technology before its key rival, AT&T Inc., which intends to launch LTE in 2011,” Unstrung editor Dan Jones noted.
In February, Verizon said it had chosen LTE technology from Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson for the network. At that time, a Verizon spokesman told PBN there was no timeline for when specific states or cities would get LTE. The carrier’s LTE Innovation Center is headquarted in Waltham, Mass.
A rival proto-4G network called WiMax is scheduled to be launched in Providence this year by Clearwire, a company backed by Sprint Nextel.
