AT&T and Verizon Fighting for Supremacy

There is a fight going on between the two most powerful wired and wireless telecommunications companies in the United States: AT&T and Verizon. They are fighting for expansion, for new customers and to keep old ones, they are fighting for new generations of 3G and 4G networks, for smarter smartphones. They are fighting against FCC’s network neutrality rulings.

In the first quarter of 2010 the number of AT&T wireless customers has reached 87 million, up with almost 35% since 2007. The rival company’s number of subscribers has reached almost 93 million through the acquisition of a smaller telecom company called Alltel (Verizon had almost 64 million subscribers in 2007). Both companies are developing their infrastructure at an increasing rate in order to attract and keep their subscribers who start to use mobile devices more and more like a means of data communications.

AT&T is the pioneer of 3G in America, technology based on the HSPA technology with a maximum bandwidth of 7.2Mbps, whereas Verizon is using the Evolution-Data Optimized technology (EV-DO) which offers a real 1.4Mbsp throughput.

AT&T was the chosen one when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 – this was one of the reasons AT&T could grow so much in such a short time. After that the company became the target of lots and lots of customer complaints – this forced them to improve their infrastructure capacity. The history could repeat itself in case of the other AT&T exclusive Apple gadget, the iPad – the devices is “dead in the water” without an active internet connection, and both devices have a huge impact upon AT&T’s data transfer infrastructure.

Both telecom companies intend to evolve – they are looking ahead to the even faster 4G networks, the next generation of wireless data technology offering a download bandwidth up to 3Mbps or even higher, 10 times better than the average 3G speeds (Verizon tests conducted in Boston and Seattle have showed downstream throughput of 5M to 12Mpbs, and upstream rates of 2M to 5Mbp). Verizon hopes to be able to deliver commercially available 4G Long-term Evolution services by the end of this year in up to 30 major cities across the US. AT&T will enter the 4G market in early 2011.

Both companies’ evolutions will be slowed down by the small number of LTE capable mobile devices on the market. Both companies are in struggle against the FCC’s net neutrality rules that limit what the service providers can do to manage data traffic throughout their networks in a world that is slowly becoming all-IP.

Only time will tell which mobile operator, AT&T or Verizon, will be the winner of this fight.