CTIA: Verizon Wireless expands its 2010 LTE plans, but still no launch date

SAN FRANCISCO -- Though it still hasn’t scheduled a launch date, Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) revealed more details of its long-term evolution (LTE) rollout later this year.

Verizon will launch in 38 major markets including New York and Los Angeles but also included cities as small West Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue University. VZW increased its 2010 target by 10 million pops and plans to offer its first 4G smartphones and tablets by the end of the second quarter of 2011. Verizon has also finalized deals with several rural providers to use its 700 MHz spectrum to build their own LTE networks, creating a potentially larger roaming footprint for Verizon and it customers.

Verizon will bring a 110-million-pop footprint online “the day we flip the switch,” Verizon Communications president and chief operating officer Lowell McAdam said during his keynote address today at CTIA Enterprise & Applications. Coverage will extend to at least 70% of the metro markets that it covers, and after launch VZW will immediately move to expand that footprint, covering two-thirds of the US population in 2012 and building 4G everywhere it has 3G coverage by 2013, McAdam said.

Though the network will launch with laptop cards, McAdam promised the quick availability of dedicated handheld devices within the year. “Come see us at CES,” McAdam said referring to the January consumer electronics event in Las Vegas. “I can tell you we’ll show you smartphones and tablets from the top OEMs that will be available in the first half of the year.”

Though VZW unveiled no specific LTE devices at CTIA, its arch competitor did. AT&T (NYSE:T) announced two high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) devices for launch later this year. One of them built by LG will be software upgradable to LTE when AT&T’s network goes live in mid-2011.
As for partnerships, McAdam said Verizon has deals in place with five rural operators to lease its 4G spectrum for their own LTE launches and is in negotiations with a dozen more. By partnering with Verizon, these operators can leverage the national carrier’s huge economies of scale, buying the same infrastructure from Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) as Verizon and selling the same handsets and laptop dongles offered by Verizon, McAdam said. Those operators and Verizon will also be able to leverage each other’s networks through roaming agreements, expanding VZW’s metro-centered footprint to remote corners of the country and allowing the smaller operators to offer national data plans, McAdam said.
The initial Verizon LTE launch will be in the following metropolitan markets: Baltimore; Boston; Chicago; Charlotte; Dallas-Fort Worth; Denver; Houston; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Minneapolis-St. Paul; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Oklahoma City; Philadelphia; Phoenix; Pittsburgh; San Antonio; San Diego; San Francisco; San Jose; Seattle-Tacoma; St. Louis; Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Athens and Atlanta, Georgia; Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando, Tampa and West Palm Beach, Florida; Rochester and New York, NY; West Lafayette, Indiana and Washington, D.C.

In addition, VZW will deploy LTE in 60 airports across the country, some in cities outside of its initial 4G footprint. VZW vice president of network Nicola Palmer said that Verizon built the network for both coverage and density, using its CDMA cellular footprint as a blueprint. Though there isn’t an LTE base station at every cellular site in these markets, they match up pretty closely, she said. The high-propagation of the 700 MHz band allowed Verizon to skip over some towers in dense cell clusters without introducing coverage holes into the network. Verizon is deploying over the full C-block 700 MHz band using a sizable 10 MHz by 10 MHz channel, which helps to boost its peak connections beyond what is a available over competing 3G and 4G networks today. Verizon is advertising download speeds averaging between 8 Mb/s and 12 Mb/s and uplink speeds between 2 Mb/s and 5 Mb/s. As Verizon uses up that considerable capacity, Palmer said, it will expand its network in two ways, deploying more sites in its existing network and by building new LTE networks over its advanced wireless service (AWS) spectrum.

In his keynote, McAdam also tried to dispel the notion that Verizon would be using the LTE network to push a walled garden agenda where VZW controlled the applications and service that traversed its network. Verizon is technically mandated to provide open access to the 4G network as a condition of its C-block license, but McAdam said VZW long ago abandoned its closed strategy. “In a 4G World we turn that walled garden model inside out,” he said.