AT&T Plans Major Announcement for July 16; VoLTE or Advanced LTE Possible

From DailyTech: When it comes to LTE coverage AT&T, Inc. (T) has been a bit behind its archrival Verizon Wireless (co-owned by Verizon Communications, Inc. (VZ) and Vodafone Group Plc (LON:VOD)), which happens to be the nation's largest network. AT&T has about 300 cities covered; Verizon Wireless has 500 cities covered.

But AT&T is the fastest LTE network. In recent testing by TechHive, AT&T averaged 13.2/6.5 Mbps versus 9.6/5.5 Mbps for Verizon Wireless. And it's spending big to try to surge ahead of Verizon in coverage while maintaining its speed lead.

AT&T teased this week that it will make a major announcement on Tuesday, July 16.

One possibility is that AT&T will announce voice-over-LTE. Current voice communications on all the major American carriers are ferried over older HSPA networks. Pushing those signals to LTE will allow for less compression and/or more noise reduction, improving call quality.

A second possibility -- seemingly even more likely -- is that AT&T will announce concrete plans for its Advanced LTE rollout. Advanced LTE promises speeds of up to 1.5 Gbps (in theory), greatly speeding up downloads and data traffic (helping you to hit your cap that much sooner!).

Since 2011 AT&T has promised to unleash advanced LTE (also known as second generation LTE or LTE-advanced) on the market by the end of 2013, with a broader rollout in 2014.

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