AT&T announced Wednesday that it will bring a faster wireless network to Raleigh and Charlotte this year, becoming the nation's last major telecommunications company to upgrade to a high-speed service that customers increasingly demand.
The company's news highlights the technological race and marketing one-upmanship that has swept the telecom industry. The high-speed wireless networks, in telecom parlance, 4G, are reputedly so fast they allow for near-instant downloading of huge files and glitch-free video streaming.
AT&T is going on a marketing blitz to showcase its 4G credentials to customers. And while it's true that AT&T's wireless Internet speeds are improving, the company is considered to lag the competition.
Even so, no telecom provider in this country is close to having true 4G capacity to provide speeds up to 50 times faster than most customers have today, analysts say. AT&T and its rivals are still years away from offering customers maximum downloading and uploading speeds.
"Everyone is trying to get on the marketing bandwagon by using the term 4G," said Phil Redman, a telecom research analyst in Boston at the Gartner firm." They're doing this to compete. They don't want to fall behind, at least on the marketing side."
AT&T staged its 4G announcement at an unmarked switch building, flanked by warehouses and a storage facility, to demonstrate its technological prowess to public officials and others. The building houses banks of digital switches and a battery room that can provide 17 hours of emergency backup power.
AT&T said it had invested about $250 million in technological upgrades in the Triangle from 2008 to 2010, but the company would not say how much more it plans to spend locally. The national budget this year is $19 billion.
Raleigh and Charlotte have been selected to be among the first AT&T markets in the nation to receive the 4G service this year, said Alison Hall, AT&T's vice president and general manager for consumer markets in the Carolinas.
AT&T will also offer customers 20 4G-enabled wireless devices, a dozen of them to run on the Android operating system. The company will upgrade to a faster form of 4G by 2013, she said.
"Raleigh is going to be on the forefront of that [technology] evolution," Hall said.
Hall said the choice of the two North Carolina cities was driven by customer demand. Still, Verizon Wireless, AT&T's biggest rival, began offering its version of 4G in Charlotte in December and plans to expand it to Raleigh this year.
In addition to Sprint Nextel, parts of the state have some type of 4G service from Time Warner Cable and Clearwire. Time Warner and Sprint Nextel run their 4G services over the Clearwire network.
AT&T did not provide its 4G speed but analysts estimated it's as high as 7 megabits per second. That's one of the slowest 4G services in the country today, said Christopher Nicoll, a telecom analyst for the Yankee Group research firm in Boston. Verizon's 4G network offers download speeds up to 12 megabits per second.
But analysts said wireless network speeds are so variable, depending on time of day and congestion, that comparisons of maximum speeds can be misleading.
Technically, the highest 4G speeds available today are offered by T-Mobile, which is deploying speeds up to 42 mbps in areas where it provides service. AT&T plans to buy T-Mobile, although that deal still requires regulatory approval.
"That's the speed you'll get if you're right next to the cell tower, if you're the only one using it, and it's not raining," said Jan Dawson, New Jersey-based chief telecom analyst for the Ovum research firm.
