April 13, 2011

Life in 4G Land

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Sorry about missing Monday’s blog post. I was out of town. Specifically, I was in a town where they offer 4G LTE service.

Oh, such is research on the road.

The 4G LTE network is only now being laid out by Verizon. There are a limited number of cities with full 4G LTE coverage.

In fact, on Verizon, there’s something like only 13 cities with 4G LTE coverage, plus a handful of major airports.

My first stop was Salt Lake City, where the city doesn’t have 4G coverage but the airport does.

As I was walking between flights, I whipped out my HTC Thunderbolt. Powered it on. And — ta-da! — there on the screen it said 4G LTE. It’s true!

Well, I couldn’t test the smokin’ features because I had a plane to catch. So I powered off the phone and headed to San Diego.

The 4G signal was all over San Diego. Nice and strong, even in places where I didn’t suspect.

Finally, once I settled down in a nice coffee shop, I was able to experience the full thrill of 4G.

O.M.G.

It’s fast! I mean, really fast. When 4G is hitting all the cylinders, it really smokes. Web pages loading as fast as they do when I’m home on the cable connection. No delays. Instant stuff. I was highly pleased.

Lamentably, the 4G network kept going down. There were times I would get only 3G on my Thunderbolt. There were times only 1X (essentially 1G) would show up.

I never got a 4G signal in Los Angeles at all. Of course, I was only in Beverly Hills, but still no 4G signal anyway. I asked, but none of the natives knew whether there was 4G service there or not, so I figure the 4G signal was just down.

Upon returning to San Diego, I found the 4G signal again. It also showed up at the Seattle airport (Seatac).

And home? Nope: Just 3G service.

Verizon plans to greatly expand its 4G LTE network by the end of the year, with full coverage by the end of 2012. It’s going to be awesome.

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