AT&T Plays LTE Catch-Up With New Devices

AT&T has clearly lagged behind the CDMA carriers in moving to next generation networks, and is trying to pull off T-Mobile's trick of masking its delays by calling HSPA '4G'. Admittedly the International Telecommunications Union did it a favor before the holiday by including 3G+ technologies under its 4G banner, but in reality, the second US cellco has some catching up to do. It is promising first LTE roll-outs this summer, considerably ahead of its schedule of a year ago, but where it really shows signs of outwitting Verizon is in devices. It is already the most advanced of the US operators in embracing new breeds of non-phone gadgets, and their revenue streams, and is now focusing on this aspect of its HSPA+ and LTE plan.

Focal Points:

• At its Consumer Electronics Show briefing, AT&T said it would start switching on LTE this summer and complete its build-out by the end of 2013. Beyond that, it was vague about how many markets would go live this year or which spectrum bands it would use, at which stage. It persistently referred to its HSPA network as '4G' and is clearly trying to present the two systems as a continuum, with the same device strategy - though with TMo recently confirming plans to upgrade to 42Mbps HSPA+ this year, AT&T lags behind in the 3G stakes too.
• The '4G' word game makes it hard to analyze AT&T's exact device plans, since of the 20 '4G' products it promises to launch this year, most will actually be for 21Mbps HSPA+, not LTE. However, more general themes are more apparent - it is building up its non-iPhone arsenal rapidly, against the probable Verizon launch of an Apple handset, and it is focusing heavily on new device types, and on multiscreen services that span its mobile and U-Verse IPTV offerings.
• AT&T showcased three upcoming HSPA+ devices at CES - the Motorola Atrix 4G, the Samsung Infuse 4G and the HTC Inspire 4G. All three run Android 2.2 (Froyo) with a heavy emphasis on the HTML5 browser. Atrix includes a laptop dock and a dual-core 1GHz processor, putting Motorola close behind LG in the race to up the processing power in superphones once more.
• AT&T also announced a cross-platform development program that will allow developers to bridge U-Verse and smartphones. The firm introduced its first multiscreen, iPhone/U-Verse app in August but is now opening up the APIs for the U-Verse set-top box to third parties to create their own apps. This should take the carrier into a multi-platform app store in future, a goal also being pursued by Orange and others. AT&T demonstrated an app that used an iPad as an interactive content guide, displaying information, widgets and links on the show on the TV screen.

David Christopher, CMO for consumer services, said the platform would be more than a means of sharing content between devices, but also a way to provide a persistent context between connected devices.

AT&T's Ralph de la Vega played down the time lag behind Verizon in mobile broadband, claiming the carrier would have two robust networks rather than relying on fallback to a non-broadband system when out of range of LTE. "We have the best transition path to 4G," he said. "We're the only company that has this path."