AT&T Plans To Cover 250 Million People With HSPA+ By End of 2010

AT&T recently changed its story on its 3.5G / 3.75G strategy prior to rolling out LTE seemingly countless times in the past couple years, but the good news is that the new policy shift is decidedly a positive one: it intends to cover about 250 million Americans in speedy HSPA+ by the end of 2010. The remarks came from AT&T OperationsCEO John Stankey at a Reuters event, going on to say that the company intends to “double” its theoretical 7.2 Mbps maximum on HSPA. It’s almost certain that this move is in response to the aggressive moves into 21 Mbps made by T-Mobile, not to mention commercial WiMAX availability on Sprint and the impending launch of a handful of LTE markets on Verizon. Realistically HSPA+ on AT&T could easily run anywhere between 7.2 and 14.4 Mbps depending on market, the backhaul capcity, and countless other factors. Seems like this move was also planned to work out well with the upcoming iPhone launch.