Hasta La Gadget!

According to Ma Bell, AT&T covers 97 percent of all Americans. Of course, that’s including those “one bar of EDGE” places that are uncovered so far as reality’s concerned, but regardless of all that — there’s no denying that AT&T’s LTE launch is on the subdued side. With Verizon rolling out five times more LTE markets this month than AT&T is even launching with, the country’s largest GSM carrier definitely has some catching up to do. Regardless of the standings, the company appears to have (quietly) gone live with five LTE markets as of today, with Chicago, Atlanta, San Antonio, Dallas / Fort Worth and Houston getting first dibs. The source link below takes you to the new coverage map, as well as to a promise from the carrier to expand “4G LTE” (not to be confused with the other 4G, more accurately known as HSPA+) to 15 major metropolitan areas by the year’s end. Notice how rural areas aren’t mentioned, despite plenty of grandstanding near D.C.? Don’t worry, guys — it’s just Rethinking Possible.

[Thanks, Marcus]

AT&T flips 4G LTE live, nearly 97 percent of America wonders where the party is originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week was packed with news on the mobile front, so it was easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here’s some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of September 12, 2011:

• Vodacom South Africa has joined the data throttling club, though this carrier is taking a slightly different spin: BlackBerry users consuming more than 100MB of data each month will find their download speeds downgraded to GPRS or EDGE. The company claims this will only affect less than five percent of its BlackBerry customers. [via N4BB]
• Bada fans: the Samsung Wave 578 is featured on Orange’s site as “coming soon.” [via The Inquirer]
• Motorola announced the availability of the Fire and Fire XT in India this week. [via Motorola]
• The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is now being sold at Vodafone UK. [via Vodafone]
• Parrot announced the most recent addition to its lineup of Bluetooth products, called the Minikit+, a refresh of its popular hands-free speakerphone. The new model offers simultaneous pairing and voice commands. [via Parrot]
• Research in Motion is hoping to put the NFC functionality in OS 7 to good use, as it announced that the BlackBerry Bold 9900 / 9330 as well as the Curve 9350 / 9360 will support HID’s iCLASS digital keys, which means corporate folks will able to use their smartphone as an access card. [via PhoneScoop]
• While digging through the Droid Bionic’s webtop app, the names of two unknown Motorola phones were discovered: the Edison and the Common. Little is known about the Common, but a recent FCC filing mentioned the Edison and is speculated to be the follow-up to the Atrix, albeit sans LTE as originally hoped. [via Droid-Life]
• The manager of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Matt Bencke, wrote a post pleading developers to submit their Mango-compatible apps as soon as possible, as the new update is coming to existing phones soon and it’s obviously very important to have Windows Phone 7.5 run as smooth as possible. [via WMPowerUser]
• A leaked Radio Shack roadmap indicates the HTC Vigor should be available in stores by October 20th, and the QWERTY-packing Samsung Stratosphere will be up for online ordering as early as October 6th. As this is a third-party retailer, we can’t say with surety that these dates reflect the carrier’s official release. [via Droid-Life]

Mobile Miscellany: week of September 12, 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Sep 2011 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We can’t say we weren’t warned, since Verizon updated its data policy way back in February, but it’s still a punch in the gut to hear its “network optimization” plan went into effect yesterday. A new policy page pointed out by Droid-Life explains how the policy will affect only the “top 5 percent of data users with 3G devices on unlimited data plans” (LTE and tiered data users are in the clear) by managing their speeds when connected to towers it has deemed are congested. Those conditions, termed network intelligence by Big Red, are what it feels separates this scheme from mere data throttling since it will only affect a few users (those consuming 2GB or more of data per month) at certain times and places, but it’s hard to see it any other way. If you’re one of those affected, expect a message on your bill or My Verizon account, although you may go into and out of the affected group depending on your usage. Hit the source link below for all the details — anyone else think it’s not a coincidence this policy popped up just before the iPhone 4 came to Verizon and is being implemented only weeks before the next iThing is expected to arrive?

Verizon starts ‘optimizing’ (read: throttling) network for the most data hungry users originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Sep 2011 23:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FCC Fridays: September 16, 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T took to the stage to announce its LTE network will go live on Sunday, which means today’s the perfect day for its fiercest rival to one-up the news. Verizon’s director of network technology Praveen Atreya, dropped the rather unsurprising news that the next natural step in the company’s data evolution chain will be LTE-Advanced. Don’t get your hopes up so fast, though: Atreya says it’s still too early in the game to test the new tech or figure out its potential speeds (spoiler: they’ll be disgustingly fast), so we’re likely not going to see any widescale deployment for at least the next few years. Still, we’re always looking forward to the next best thing, so learning that Big Red is following Clearwire’s lead in adopting the technology is reassuring, to say the least.

Shocker: Verizon director admits to LTE-Advanced future originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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