First look at AT&T’s LTE network finds plenty of speed

“Yesterday I took a tour of AT&T’s Foundry space in Plano, Texas. I interviewed Jon Summers, SVP of application and service infrastructure at AT&T, with other reporters, to try to understand the shift AT&T is making in how it approaches buying goods and services and brings new technologies and applications to its network,” Stacey Higginbotham reports for GigaOM.

“And for me, the highlight of the lab was the fact that the Foundry is home to a trial Long Term Evolution network,” Higginbotham reports. “So I asked for a demo and got one. The speeds provided on the download side were about 28.87 Mbps and were about 10.4 Mbps on the upload side. This compared to speeds of 3.77 on the download side and 1.21 Mbps on the upload for an iPhone that was capable of maxing out on AT&T’s 7.2 Mbps HSPA network.”

Higginbotham reports, “So it’s fast, but sharing those speeds with others on a cell tower will bring them down. For comparison, Verizon has promised customers speeds of 5-12 Mbps on the download side and speeds of up 5 Mbps on the upload side.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]

13 Comments

        1. If you’re doing more than 200 per month, I wouldn’t classify that as “hardly” using it. No, you’re not a 14 year old in terms of volume, but hardly would be 3 or 4 per month.

    1. I’m on the $10 for 1000 text messages a month plan. The one they instituted when they killed the $5 plan. True, it’s overkill but I did find myself going over 200 texts/month with the old plan.

      In any case texting should be free. Under LTE I hope they treat all service as data, including voice, and just let us pay a flat rate for the amount of data we use. But that would be way too logical.

  1. 4G sounds good, in theory.

    macromancer,
    At&t smartphone data plans are very competitive if not the best in the industry. If you are wanting a less-than-iPhone experience, go to Virgin mobile. They have the best plan for the buck.

  2. As a senior Apple manager I can say that it is irrelevant how fast if there is no unlimited data. Boom. That is why we at Apple are excited to release our new product to you this weekend.

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