Verizon’s LTE network is so expansive, it now wants to offer it as a broadband replacement.
And from a technical point of view, it probably could hold muster. The carrier’s high-speed network is just about as fast as any kind of Internet connection you currently get from your cable provider.
This isn’t like the current mobile modems that companies are offering, though. This solution will actually make you fork over a lot more money that whatever the cable companies are charging.
And that’s where we talk about the market that this is targeting. Verizon isn’t planning on actually making you cancel that cable subscription.
Instead, what it wants is for the consumers who cannot in fact get such a cable connection – those who are in more rural areas that are covered by the LTE network but not by a cable broadband provider.
So, yeah, it will cost $200 a month to use Verizon’s new “HomeFusion” connection.
When it comes to 4G, Verizon was late to the game. Sprint was the first to the market with its Evo 4G phone that came out more than two years ago.
But Sprint’s network was powered by a standard called Wimax, which was significantly faster than the previous 3G network infrastructures but not nearly as fast as LTE.
AT&T and T-Mobile, meanwhile, launched their 4G services on a completely different standard known as HSPA+, which was inferior to Wimax so Sprint still dominated the game for a while.
But then Verizon finally entered the 4G market, and because it took the time to wait it was able to launch an LTE network from the outset. It quickly leapfrogged right ahead of all its competitors.
