Verizon Says: 4G Network Capable of 5-12mbps Download

Posted 03/08/2010 at 4:27pm | by Ryan Whitwam

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It may be a while before the new cell standard known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) comes to your neck of the woods, but Verizon is already deep in testing of the new technology. They’ve been so good as to release some early speed estimates based on their tests in Boston and Seattle. The results are pretty good, but frankly not as good as we’d hoped.

According to Verizon’s PR statement, the LTE network is substantially faster than the current Ev-Do Rev. A network Big Red is running. This certainly doesn’t surprise anyone though. Verizon engineers were able to get an impressive 40-50Mbps down and 20-25Mbps up with ideal conditions. You know, the sort of ideal conditions you will basically never experience. Real world speeds should be around 5-12Mbps down and 2-5Mbps up.

This is nice (really, we’d love to get speeds like that on a cell network), but a little discouraging when you consider the theoretical max for this new LTE equipment is in the neighborhood of 100Mbps down. This is still preliminary, and the network could be stronger than expected when it rolls out to 25-30 markets later this year. With T-Mobile expected to bump up their data to HSPA+ 3G at 21Mbps maximum speed, the initial difference may not be as stark as we thought.