AT&T Switches on 4G LTE in 11 Markets, Including New York City

AT&T Switches on 4G LTE in 11 Markets, Including New York City

January 06, 2012 by Peter Pachal On Mashable

Got LTE? If you have an AT&T LTE phone and live in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles or eight other major cities in the U.S., the answer is finally yes.

AT&T finally flipped the switch on its 4G LTE (long-term evolution) network in 11 markets today, including the three mentioned above as well as Austin, Chapel Hill, Oakland, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, San Diego and San Jose. That brings the total number of areas AT&T customers can get LTE to 26, or about 74 million people, the carrier says.

AT&T is a bit late. After announcing in November that LTE was coming to the New York metro area, the company later promised it would be active by the end of 2011. But the Big Apple dropped to ring in 2012, and anyone with an LTE phone like the Samsung Skyrocket still had an empty 4G icon staring back at them.

Now the network is active, and those users can start surfing the web and downloading at fast LTE speeds. Users may experience different mileage depending on which market they’re in, though (observers have noted that speeds are faster in Houston, for example, than Chicago), since AT&T deploys LTE a bit differently in different areas.

AT&T says its LTE rollout should be complete by the end of 2013. The carrier had been counting on adapting T-Mobile’s network technology to serve its LTE network after AT&T made a bid to buy the company last year. That deal fell through, however, so AT&T will have to adjust its plan to bring LTE to the entire country.

LTE, of course, is the latest and greatest wireless network technology, connecting phones and modems to the Internet on cellphone networks at speeds much faster than 3G, or even slower “4G” technologies like WiMax or HSPA+. AT&T first began rolling out its long-awaited LTE network in September of 2011, becoming the second carrier to do so. Verizon went first in December 2010.

For a refresher on what LTE is, the AT&T-made video below covers the basics pretty well. Do you have and LTE device in one of the markets listed above? Is it working, and how fast is your connection? Let us know in the comments.