Verizon: LTE Will Offer 5-12 Mbps Download Speeds
November 17, 2009While all is quiet on the Long Term Evolution (LTE) news front — we recently contacted Verizon Wireless folks to ask if there was any word on its much-touted test deployments of LTE in Seattle and Boston, which are supposed to happen before the calendar says it’s 2010 — and we got the sounds of silence in reply. (Actually, we were told “no news now” but we are betting we’ll hear more at CES in January.)
But you’d be mistaken to think that Big Red isn’t cranking levers, setting up towers and the like, because LaTE or not, LTE is coming. As proof we now have the Verizon LTE Innovation center, a website with some actual meat on the bones — as in, Verizon saying officially, publicly, that its initial implementation of the next-generation version of wireless data communications will likely offer download speeds of between 5 Mbps and 12 Mbps, with upload speeds of 2 Mbps to 5 Mbps. (If you are keeping score like we do, these figures sound pretty much like we predicted back in February, and way, way off the 50 Mbps or higher numbers that other predictive types were cheering about).
Taken with the appropriate grains of salt that recognize that this Verizon site is a public relations vehicle, and not a scientific or standards-body document, it is nevertheless pleasant to see some facts and figures instead of mere puffery, like Verizon claiming it will offer something it calls a “10 + 10 MHz implementation” for LTE, which we are guessing is a vague reference to the channel size it will use. If you are a wireless gearhead you may sort-of know what Verizon is talking about here, but if you are an advanced wireless gearhead you will want some more details, mainly about how Verizon plans to eliminate channel interference with this somewhat non-traditional method of deployment.
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4G, LTE, Wireless | Tagged: 4G, Clearwire, Long Term Evolution, LTE, Paul Kapustka, Sidecut Reports, Sprint, Verizon, Wi-Fi, WiMAX | 
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