Verizon LTE next year?

Verizon CTO Dick Lynch (yeah...) said yesterday that LTE, the next step in wireless broadband, will be starting service sometime next year. Of course, that allows them up to December 31st, 2009 to implement this, but I'm still happy to hear it. And they plan on using the 700 MHz broadcast band they purchased the rights to this year to do it. This will allow the signal to travel through buildings without much impedement.

I have been hoping for this kind widespread broadband connectivity for some time and it looks like 2009 is the year all this will come to fruition. And coupled with Clearwire's WiMAX and the proposed Wi-Fi from the FCC, it looks like there will be a good deal of choice. Now we just have to hope that these services will be competitive with each other pricewise.

Fingers crossed.

Xohm is dead. Long live Clearwire!

I guess my previous post about the lack of pervasive interwebs got the FCC of their duffs. Sprint's XOHM and Clearwire have been approved to merge. The new company is called Clearwire and will be providing broadband speed WiMAX over the US, starting in major markets.

Initially, I was skeptical about WiMAX. Not as a standard, but most due to the fact that no one in the states had committed to the technology. It's used in a good amount of countries, including South Korea, Russia and Singapore, but it has yet to have a sizable footprint here. Thankfully, Clearwire will be building all their towers here to be upgradable to the LTE (Long Term Evolution) 4G wireless standard that everyone seems to be agreeing on. This means that the start of this infrastructure is looking very good indeed.

I'm glad this thing seems to finally be getting off the ground. I tend to have a good deal of information stored in the "cloud", and it would be nice to have access to it on an on-demand basis.

Now I just have to wait for it to show up here.