AT&T HSPA+ Network to Cover 250 Million Americans in 2010; Not Necessarily Good News

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With all the talk surrounding the Apple – AT&T iPhone exclusivity, the CDMA iPhone, the Sprint HTC EVO 4G Android smartphone arrival and the LTE testing done by Big Red, we should definitely wonder what does AT&T have planned for the very near future?

The carrier has been the exclusive Apple partner in the USA for three years now and that partnership might go on for another two years, but that doesn’t mean every AT&T iPhone customer out there is happy with their mobile phone operator. The iPhone is really popular, but so are the issues with AT&T’s network when it comes to iPhone usage in certain AT&T markets. No matter how hard AT&T would fight anyone making fun of its network (like Verizon did this winter) there’s still plenty of bad publicity to address. And what better way to do it than improving the whole infrastructure and prepare it for the future.

Sprint and Verizon are definitely ready for entering 4G with Sprint having quite an advantage when it comes to 4G actual commercial usage. Sprint also has the first WiMAX smartphone in the world ready to be used on its 4G network and it so happens that it’s an Android phone, the HTC EVO 4G. We won’t forget T-Mobile either, which is slowly but surely upgrading its own network to 21Mbps speeds.

With all these in mind we’re definitely interested to see where AT&T is headed in order to properly fight the competition. And it looks like AT&T is not ready for 4G yet as there are no 4G plans in sight. Instead the company will focus on its HSPA+ data network which should, at least in theory, bring its subscribers betters Internet surfing speeds which will be averaging somewhere between 7.2Mbps and 14.4Mbps.

AT&T is said to bring HSPA+ to no less than 250 million Americans by the end of the year which sounds impressive and hopefully it will actually be enough to meet the needs of those few million iPhone and other smartphone users.

But that’s not exactly good news since this extensive network upgrade might be considered by a certain Cupertino-based partner a little too little and a little too late. The CDMA iPhone threat is still happen and it could all happe later this year, in which case AT&T will surely lose some customers to Verizon.

Let’s hear it from AT&T subscribers and current iPhone customers. What are your thoughts on AT&T’s network (current and future) and on the iPhone 4G arrival?