Verizon’s 4G service
Unlike previous systems that use switches to control traffic, 4G uses “cores,” that act like large, centralized command-and-control centers. Switches covered city blocks, but 4G cores are now serving multiple states. If one goes out, entire regions could lose service.AT&T plans on adding another “10 or more” markets in the second half of the year, but it didn’t say which markets they will be.Mobile data traffic has more than doubled in each of the past three years, according to Cisco.
The company says its Long Term Evolution (LTE) service will be available to 70 million Americans by the end of 2011.Customers across the country, from California to Ohio to Virginia, took to Verizon’s forums to complain that service was knocked out, though gripes were mostly limited to the new 4G LTE data network, which Verizon began to roll out a year ago. Voice calls, texts and 3G data were unaffected, according to the company.4G-branded network.
That network runs on a different, “HSPA+” standard, which is actually a 3G standard, but has been shown to deliver speeds on par with — or faster than — LTE. LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, but it isn’t a long-term solution to the nation’s wireless problems. Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) and HTC named the first LTE smartphone “Thunderbolt” for a reason.It was the second nationwide outage in as many weeks for Verizon’s 4G network, and the third since April.
That’s a tough pill to swallow for Verizon, which has built its brand on network reliability.Yes, that’s right: AT&T’s current 4G offering could, in some instances, be faster than its soon-to-be-released, new 4G network.Some early customers on Verizon’s recently launched LTE network say they’ve clocked speeds of double the 12 Mbps maximum target that the carrier advertised.”Verizon is a pioneer, and it’s suffering the fate that all pioneers face,” said Ken Rehbehn, analyst at Yankee Group.
“Depending upon a user’s location and configuration of cell sites nearby, HSPA+ could exceed — or even radically exceed — speeds achieved with LTE,” said Dan Hays, telecom consultant at PRTM. The bad news for Verizon and its customers is that wireless infrastructure experts expect this isn’t the last time the 4G network will go down. Since Verizon was the first company in the world to deploy a 4G LTE network at any great scale, it is dealing with the usual early adopter growing pains.
