AT&T joins Sprint, Clearwire, Ericsson in scheduling LTE-Advanced for 2013

AT&T is the latest carrier to announce plans to launch LTE-Advanced technology. Speaking at the LTE North America conference yesterday, Krish Prabhu, president and CEO of AT&T Labs, said the deployment would happen in 2013. Aside from the "timeframe," Prabhu offered no additional details.

Still, it was more specific than anything offered by Verizon, whose LTE Innovation Center director has said the carrier plans to go that route, though little else.

Sprint executive Iyad Tarazi, speaking at the 4G World conference two weeks ago, put Sprint's timetable for an LTE-Advanced deployment at a slightly more specific "first half of 2013."

Finally, Clearwire, in August, put the term in quotes, announcing it was preparing to deploy an "LTE-Advanced ready" network. Part of what that means, Clearwire CTO John Saw later explained to Connected Planet, is that it will deploy the network in such a way that once LTE-Advanced devices are available, Clearwire will be able to flip the switch (CP: CTO explains Clearwire's unique flavor of LTE)

It also means that Clearwire will be able to aggregate carriers into huge-bandwidth pipes, with a currently unparalleled capacity.

Connected Planet reported at the time:

LTE-Advanced will let Clearwire deploy not just one 40 MHz carrier but multiple 40 MHz carriers. Clearwire has more than 100 MHz of 2.5 GHz of spectrum in all of its markets, but in the largest markets its holdings go all the way up to 160 MHz. That means in some of the largest markets Clearwire could deploy four 40 MHz carriers if it were to phase out WiMAX. To put that in perspective, AT&T’s proposed mega-carrier, built by combining its own and T-Mobile’s advanced wireless service (AWS) spectrum, also would total 40 MHz, while Verizon’s current LTE networks runs off of 20 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum.

In June, Ericsson deployed a test LTE-Advanced network in Stockholm(Unfiltered: Ericsson moves a step closer to LTE-Advanced (or did it?)), a feat that required aggregating three 20 MHz carriers into a single downlink, along with eight smart antennas at the tower and another eight at the receiver.

"From an end user perspective, you will enjoy higher bit rate ... with many users at the same time, compared to the systems that we have today," Robert Jensen, with Ericsson's LTE marketing team, says in a video demonstration of the technology.

Ericsson, too, has its calendar marked for 2013.