AT&T CTO John Stankey announced that his company’s new LTE wireless service, which is said to be ten times faster than 3G service, will roll out in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, Texas sometime this summer. He made the announcement this morning at a Barclays Capital conference.
AT&T said previously it would roll out LTE “by the end of 2011,” but has been showing signs of pressure to get its service to market to compete with Verizon’s impressive LTE service.
While AT&T says it will begin selling new the new service this summer, it’s unclear what new AT&T devices will be able to connect to the service at launch. While AT&T has said that it will release 20 “4G” devices by the end of the year, it has been vague about how many of those devices will be real 4G, that is, LTE. (Like T-Mobile, AT&T has been branding its 3G HSPA+ service “4G”).
AT&T released one LTE device last year, the USBConnect Adrenaline by LG, which will get a small software upgrade to make it LTE-ready, presumably this summer.
Stankey added that AT&T will roll out LTE service in 10 additional markets by the end of this year, and that AT&T plans to reach 70 million Americans with LTE by year’s end.
We’ll have more information when actual launch dates and device updates becomes available.