Verizon responds to AT&T, adds 29 LTE markets
Verizon customers in Selma, Al. and Port Angeles, Wa. are among the cities getting access to the company's 4G LTE network. — Verizon has added 29 new LTE markets to its service. — The company announced today that Selma, Al. and Port Angeles …
Context & Ripple Effects
Verizon's December 2012 announcement is the latest step in a rollout that has run on a steady cadence since it targeted 145 markets by the end of 2011 and passed the halfway-population mark that August. By June 2012 the network had reached more than 300 US markets, and a July CNET report already framed the story as a gap: AT&T kept adding LTE cities but was still struggling to catch Verizon. Adding 29 more markets just before year-end keeps that cadence going into smaller cities like Selma, Ala. and Port Angeles, Wash.
The timing matters beyond coverage maps. Days earlier, Verizon confirmed its Redbox Instant joint venture positioned against Netflix, and it shut down Vcast Video, its mobile video service from 2005 — moves that only pay off if the pipe underneath them is fast and everywhere. The pickup across eight outlets, from The Seattle Times to PadGadget, shows how closely the market tracks each increment of this footprint.
First-order effects
- Customers in the 29 new markets, including Selma and Port Angeles, gain access to Verizon's 4G LTE network immediately, extending the footprint past the 300-market level reported in June.
- The move answers AT&T's own market additions from July, keeping Verizon's LTE lead intact heading into 2013 device-upgrade season.
Second-order effects
- AT&T faces continued pressure to accelerate its own LTE buildout, since the July coverage showed its additions were narrowing but not closing the gap.
- A denser LTE footprint strengthens Verizon's position for bandwidth-hungry services like the confirmed Redbox Instant streaming venture, which competes with Netflix partly on delivery quality.
Third-order effects
- If both carriers keep matching each other's market counts, competition shifts from who has LTE at all to who has it in secondary and rural markets — making coverage breadth, not speed claims, the durable differentiator.
- Retiring legacy services like Vcast Video while expanding LTE points toward carriers consolidating their video and content bets on the 4G network itself rather than maintaining parallel platforms.
The trend: The US carrier duopoly is turning LTE market count into its headline competitive metric, with each side announcing expansions to counter the other and coverage racing outward from metros into small-city America.