Let it never be said that big corporations aren’t prone to hyperbole. At CTIA, amid questions regarding Clearwire’s head start with 4G network rollouts, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg reacted with quite the strange quote. He said that Verizon thinks they can achieve, no joke, “500 percent penetration” with their LTE network. Yes, that means that every man, woman, and child in the U.S. would have five mobile devices connected to their service. Perhaps he meant LTE in general, and not just Verizon? Remember, of course, that would only be the average. Poor people won’t have five mobile devices, so Seidenberg is really saying that some people will have 10 mobile devices connected to their network. That seems bloody unlikely, especially as we move towards consolidated devices.
Even more interestingly, Seidenberg provides a quote as to how his network, which now caps bandwidth use because of network capacity concerns, can handle so many devices. “There will be no limit on the number of connections as part of the mobile grid.” That doesn’t sound like the Verizon we’ve come to know over the past few years. Is their CEO really saying that there’s no limit? No, not really. He’s just talking about the number of devices connected, not the data they consume. There are no indications that Verizon will be any more open with their LTE network than they are their current EVDO network.
The nation’s largest cellular operator will get a chance to test their theories as early as next year. As we also learned at CTIA, Verizon will deploy LTE in 25 to 30 markets next year.
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