Then OTA upgrades their phones and then well see who’s behind.

One thing to bear in mind re:backbones and fiber and backhaul is that it’s not exactly rocket science to pull fiber to wherever you want it. It’s pretty easy in most cases and where it isn’t (or maybe everywhere), wireless backhaul is probably going to work pretty well. Half the fun setting up wireless backhaul is getting line of sight, after all, and these things are going to be sited on existing towers designed for good LOS. Last time we setup wireless backhaul for my company, we were right next to a cell tower and that tower was already pre-qualified for LOS. If we could have had access to it, we’d have been done. A day for plenty of bandwidth.

What is interesting to me is that while VZW and Sprint are basically forced into a technology transition and AT&T is stuck with a lot of legacy gear, T-Mobile is basically starting from scratch with a network that can scale to near LTE speeds without the risk and cost of investing in LTE. They have a very clean path to enough bandwidth to last them for several years.

Yeah the old tv spectrum auctions doled out a LOT of space so we’ll see what comes of it, especially for competing companies who currently have different technologies & bands. It would be great if they all played nice so we could all have best coverage & speeds in the shortest time but we’ll see.

No kidding, so true! I had ATT for many years (as in Ameritech wireless to AT&T Wireless to Cingular to ATT Mobility) and besides some transitions (like when they dropped TDMA & went to GSM and when they were switching from 850 to 1900) I always had great connectivity, awesome call quality & rarely a drop call. The joke was you could always tell someone on Verizon or Sprint because it was garbled & sounded like they were talking through a voice synthesizer so those of us on ATT would make fun but ATT got greedy, jacked up pricing and oversold their network for the iphone and ATT & customers were paying for it. The highly noticeable difference in call quality, the dropped calls, the super slow 3G/EDGE at times and their high prices made me jump ship to TMobile and I was quite happy until TMobile decided it was time to shake things up with the new plans and they made it clear they are wanting to play along with the big 3 and soak people wherever they can while trying to seem like they are the best deal. Not everyone wants/needs unlimited talk, text, data so why push those or eliminate options besides unlimited unless you are just greedy and hoping to rake in some more cash at the expense of abuse to your network. I mean seriously, if ATT would have had non-unlimited plans for iphone their network issues would be as extreme because instead of people trying to “get their money’s worth” and using so much data streaming 24×7 or running torrents etc they would have used it more sparingly. Anyway, I understand some people want unlimited to avoid the anxiety of unknown bills but in reality if the overage charges by all cell companies weren’t so high there’d be very little need for unlimited since normal people don’t even come close to 40,000 minutes of talking each month or 133GB of data or 250,000 text messages per month if they sat there doing each 24×7 so in the end unlimited is just a marketing ploy to force people into higher priced plans that has an unfortunate side-effect of causing nasty abuse and network problems when people try to get what they can for their money.

Do you remember the dotbombs? Well during that time a lot of fiber was sprawled across the country by companies that promised we’d have fiber to our homes and bandwidth would be plentiful. Since those companies tanked there has been miles and miles of dark fiber laying around. Companies like Google and Verizon have been buying it up….in particular Verizon where there are have limited presence or none at all. It’s not difficult for Verizon to run fiber in areas they don’t have it. I’m sure that in areas that may fact some challenge there are data providers they could buy or partner with. That’s a fairly resolvable issue.

As far as sprectrum….do you remember the auction of spectrum some time last year I believe. Know who the big winners were? Verizon and AT&T. Those two have more than enough air to handle the migration to LTE. Rest assured AT&T and Verizon have a well thought out plan to deploy LTE. I don’t think Verizon will have and issue handling the load as the migration begins to pick up.

The problem with AT&T wasn’t necessarily the network…their 3G network was quite reliable a looooong time ago. The problem was putting too many people on it at the sacrifice of trying to be #1 by using the iPhone. Before the iPhone came around I never heard complaints about service but that’s what happens when they attracted so many people with such a great device. They weren’t prepared and they’re paying for it. Greedy bastards.

Verizon is in good shape where they have a fiber backbone. The problem is, there are areas where there is Verizon Wireless but no Verizon landline. I live in Florida for instance. There is no Verizon carrier delivering circuits to the cell sites. In this case, they will have to depend on AT&T to get the fiber to their sites. This is what will cause the 4G to be spotty for awhile. There are some areas I can guarantee Verizon will absolutely not have 4G anytime soon due to lack of fiber. There are some areas covered by some of the “Ma and Pa Bells” where Verizon will be completely unable to get fiber to cells yet.

Verizon’s 4G build, will likely resemble AT&Ts 3G build. It will be strong in the core, but lacking outside. However, Verizon has pretty good speeds on the outside regardless. It just won’t be the 40-100mb/s you will see initially with LTE.

I’m absolutely certain Verizon will be in a massive rush to rollout LTE. As has been noted, they have to. They are essentially wedged at EVDO-A and their only path to higher bandwidth is to push LTE. That’s somewhat problematic for a number of reasons – first, the absolute and utter dearth of LTE devices. Second is bandwidth.

LTE is going to require them to allocate new spectrum. They doubtless have enough spectrum that they can overlay their existing footprint, but that’s going to be a massive undertaking – new equipment and antennas at the nodes, new devices into customer’s hands, etc. Can they do it? I have no doubt. But it’s not likely to be an overnight affair. I’m sure they will have working LTE deployments, primarily for bragging purposes, by the end of 2010, but also that it will be mostly for aircards and the like, not actual phones.

Until they complete the cutover, people will old phones (i.e. – the Droid) are going to be stuck on EVDO-A and may actually see their EVDO-A coverage decline as Verizon starts to cut their cherry spectrum over to LTE, probably as they start to cut all their top of the line phones over to LTE (end of 2010? 2011? There are none now.)

And, while Verizon undoubtedly has a heck of a fiber backbone, fiber is not exactly hard or expensive to find or pull. Time consuming, yes. I rather doubt that even they have a majority of their nodes on fiber today – too expensive and not necessary until you are serious about something higher than, say, EVDO-A.

Contrast this with T-Mobile. As near as I can tell, every single smartphone they’ve shipped will go to 7.2mbps immediately. Flip a switch and they are double the bandwith. They’ve known this since they started their 3g rollout, so I suspect they’ve provisioned their nodes with enough bandwidth for that, and maybe fiber in spots, so that they are ready for HSPA+. HSPA+ is a known thing – chipsets are rolled out, deployments have happened, and it can happen in their existing footprint without disruption. That takes them to 21Mbps, maybe 42Mpbs without getting wildly disruptive.

Now, if you seriously think that your mobile device is going to require or be able to consume anything like that, I’d like to know how. If you are planning on running torrent sites, maybe. Even streaming HD video (why? To a handheld device? You only need a fraction of HD, any more is just burning battery to resize down to your screen size.) Is it going to make your experience “faster”? I rather doubt it, I think you will be limited by a lot of other bits of hardware (CPU, RAM, etc.) to well below anything like that amount of bandwidth used. That will change, sure, but there’s the window for upgrading to LTE.

So, when you get right down to it LTE/HSPA+ are all about capacity. And there is PLENTY of room in what T-Mobile has today or can rollout with minimal disruption.

Verizon, on the other hand, has to move. Has to.

AT&T is in a much better place – but they have a ton of older iPhones out there and until those get replaced, they have a lot of data moving over EDGE or lower speed 3G. Not good.

I quite prefer where T-Mobile is right now. They are clearing the hump on 3G deployment and can concentrate on backfilling coverage. And in the meanwhile, it seems to me that I am less likely to be encountering slow nodes, saturated nodes, etc than I am with Verizon (EVDO-A wall) or AT&T (older devices constraining them). By the end of this year, T-Mobile, if they are to plan, should not only have 7.2 deployed, *they should have all their devices using it*. They move quickly and some time in 2010, have 21Mbps HSPA+ deployed and a lot of devices using that, all of which gives them (I expect) a better user experience than I’m likely to see with either VZW or AT&T. As LTE becomes more of a mainstream thing, they either overlay that on their existing EDGE spectrum or maybe they take a pass for a while. Fully built out HSPA+ could well be sufficient for several years.

BTW, and this is of course a YMMV affair, but I’m coming from 10+ years of VZW and have been on T-Mobile only a year; my dropped call experience has been about on par. What I have seen, which I did not see with VZW, has been an aggressive (and I mean *aggressive*) node expansion on T-Mobile’s part. They put up three towers in my town alone; VZW added…none. Going to depend a lot about where you are and where you go, like all coverage. But I like the math here, too. VZW is going to be spending like crazy rolling out new LTE gear. T-Mobile can get much of the same bang for a hell of a lot less bucks – that means they can concentrate their cash on coverage.

All of this assumes a lot. I have not inside information and I’m speculating wildly. But that is my read on the current situation.

And why I’m passing on a Droid for now.

I just wanted to add one rebuttal to your statement of Verizon’s need to deploy fiber. That’s an easy fix since they’ve been doing so for quite some time now (FIOS). I wouldn’t imagine Verizon not being forward thinking provisioning some of that for their future LTE network. If they’ve started in Seattle and Boston they surely have a fiber network in place already. I have FIOS here in southern California – lightning FAST.

CDMA still has some breathing room and Verizon is intent on an aggressive LTE roll out to keep up with the needs of its customers.

It’s public knowledge of Verizon and AT&T’s intent to rollout LTE next year. Didn’t you get the memo? It’s been AT&T and Verizon putting forth the most efforts in setting technical standards for the platform. News reports I read made of T-Mobile’s lack of participation if these when they were the ones kicking and screaming about nothing getting down. How come they haven’t shown up?

LTE isn’t a figment of our imagination…in the coming months and year it’s going to be the reality AT&T and Verizon remain committed to being innovative and competitive. T-Mobile on the other hand will continue to babysit their relic Edge network and the hobbling 3G one. You can stick around if you’d like I’ve moved on until I see significant improvements in T-Mobile. Low prices isn’t that it’s cracked up to be.

I’ll leave you with this. Since I switched to VZW I have yet to drop a call in areas where i did on T-Mo’s Edge or 3G network. Not saying I ever won’t but so far places where I routinely drop are a thing of the past. That’s assuring.