It’s a good day for next-gen network news, assumingly — initial Verizon promised to bring its 4G network to 30 NFL cities by a finish of the year, and right away AT&T’s John Stankey says the LTE network will arrive by mid-2011. Trials are already underway in Baltimore as well as Dallas, as well as Ma Bell’s pulled a little $700 million out of a kitty to account the buildout, with investment scheduled to go “distant beyond which” next year. On tip of which, AT&T is also working to ascent its backhaul connectors for its current HSPA 7.2 3G sites to Gigabit Ethernet, and it’s formulation to upgrade a vast infancy of its 3G sites to HSPA+ for real-world 7Mbps 3G download speeds sometime this year — the clearly big expansion from a “sure locations” we’d been betrothed earlier. Why a shift? We don’t know exactly, but AT&T is discerning to indicate out that LTE business will fall back to 3G utterly often in a early days, as well as that Verizon isn’t investing in 3G speeds at all anymore — an interesting explain and potentially the major differentiator if a HSPA+ rollout is finished quickly, but one that won’t matter if Verizon’s network offers enough coverage. We’ll see — looks similar to the next year is starting to be strong engaging.

Via Engadget