Comments on article found at: http://connectedplanetonline.com/3g4g/news/att-lte-launch-to-closely-follow-verizon-0916/

With Sprint and Clearwire making serious inroads in their respective 4G deployments and Verizon announcing its intent to deploy LTE by end of year, it is no surprise that AT&T would announce its own deployment plans.

The wireless business is actually easy to understand. As soon as a major player makes a decision or promotes a rate plan, the rest of the cellular carriers follow. Remember, how nearly every analyst under the sun proclaimed that prepaid cellular was neither a long-term business plan nor even a viable one. Two years later, suddenly the same talking heads are proclaiming prepaid is here to stay and how suddenly the market has taken off.

I call it the “instant business case to deploy technology”. This is how I describe the instant business case: your competitor implements a business initiative but you decide they are wrong because all of your business case studies and your Wall Street analysts tell you it is bad. . Next day, you wake up to discover your competitor is making money. The next day you start copying your competitor. The instant business case to deploy technology; your competitor is making money on the same initiative you wanted to implement much later. Of course AT&T is going to have to deploy LTE sooner.

AT&T had to make a move on LTE. Now that Verizon was serious about deploying LTE as opposed to be coy about it, AT&T has to deploy.

My suggestion to investors; don’t think about whether AT&T should deploy or not deploy LTE because it has to deploy LTE. My preference would have been for AT&T to wait until it built up its cash reserves but the reality is that reality has set in - AT&T’s biggest competitor is about to launch LTE.

The questions I have for AT&T is:
• “Do you have a go-to-market plan”?