Peer pressure forcing AT&T Mobility to hit the gas pedal?

Is the speed race getting to AT&T Mobility?
It would appear so as the nation’s No. 2 carrier is set to update its current 3G network with HSPA+ technology, just months after saying it would stop 3G upgrades at the 7.2 specification.
On the carrier’s blog this morning, AT&T’s CTO John Donovan said the carrier planned to upgrade to HSPA+ later this year ahead of its planned launch of LTE services beginning in 2011. Donovan noted the move to HSPA+ would be based on its recent 7.2 upgrades that included increased backhaul capabilities at cell sites that will also be used for its LTE deployments.
While Donovan did not provide details on the depth of upgrades the carrier would make along the HSPA+ path, published reports from indicated the carrier was looking at going to the 14.4 specification that would provide for theoretical network download speeds of up to 14.4 megabits per second compared with the 7.2 Mbps currently possible with the 7.2 specification.
AT&T has recently launched a new advertising campaign with the “Rethink” tagline and images of advanced telecommunications services. This new marketing emphasis would seem to dictate that the carrier stay as far ahead of the curve as possible when it comes to wireless capabilities, thus the new plans to move ahead with HSPA+ deployments.
The new emphasis is not expected to dampen the carrier’s plans for LTE. The carrier’s president and CEO Ralph de la Vega has noted on several occasions the greater efficiency that AT&T Mobility will gain from the move to the all IP-based LTE technology as well as the eventual scale the technology will garner with broader deployments.
But, with its competitors moving aggressively with advanced deployments, AT&T Mobility seems to have little choice but to move ahead with HSPA+, though the carrier sees itself in a different position.
“As the LTE ecosystem evolves over the next few years, 3G is going to be very important because customers will fall back to it frequently,” a company spokeswoman noted. “When they do, we want to ensure they have a great experience. That’s why, unlike our competitors, we continue to invest in our 3G network to increase its speeds – first with HSPA 7.2 and now with HSPA+. Our competitors are not increasing the speeds of their 3G networks, which we think doesn’t service customers well. They are in a big hurry. But that doesn’t mean they are ahead.”
T-Mobile USA Inc. announced at the recent CTIA event that it planned to cover 185 million potential customers with the HSPA+ 21 standard – providing download speeds up to 21 Mbps – by the end of this year.
Verizon Wireless has said it plans to cover at least 100 million pops in up to 30 markets by the end of the year with its new LTE network that the carrier said was showing peak download speeds of up to 50 Mbps in testing, though a video the carrier recently released showed real-world download speeds of around 8.5 Mbps.
Sprint Nextel Corp. is partnering with Clearwire Corp. to launch WiMAX services covering 120 million pops by the end of the year, and already offers the service in dozens of markets providing real-world download speeds of around 6 Mbps. Clearwire has also hinted that it could look towards other technology deployments, including LTE, going forward.
All of this should be good news for wireless infrastructure providers always looking to prod their carrier partners to deploy the latest network equipment, as well as consumers that are increasingly looking to do more with their mobile devices.