Verizon to Light Up LTE All at Once
Posted by Jesse Ward on Monday, September 28, 2009 · 
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Verizon Wireless is marching full steam ahead with long-term evolution (LTE), and plans to light up its nationwide network next year in one fall swoop rather than deploying it in a traditional market-by-market rollout.
The rollout “will be as close to all-at-once as possible,” Verizon Wireless Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Tony Melone told Information Week. ” We want to give our customers a significant footprint,” he said, and won’t tease them with trial deployments.
This is aided by the fact that LTE is able to use much of the existing network infrastructure, including towers and backhaul gear. In fact, Melone described the move to LTE from Verizon’s existing CDMA EVDO network as an “overlay” and not a “switchover.”
Verizon Wireless hasn’t yet given specific dates on its nationwide deployment, but it has pledged to rollout LTE sometime in 2010 in 25- 30 markets. The company plans to have the service available for some 100 million points of presence (POPs) in 2010, and continue to deploy the network over the next two to three years.
Read more at Information Week.
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