While AT&T is well behind both Verizon and T-Mobile in launching its faster LTE based wireless network, the company is finally revealing the first US cities that will benefit from the faster data speeds when the service does go live later this year. In a new press release today, AT&T revealed that Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio will be the debut locations for the LTE service when it goes live sometime this summer. Furthermore, AT&T says that it will add 10 more unnamed locations in the US in the second half of 2011 to have LTE service. The company claims by the end of the year, the LTE network will cover 70 million people in the US.
In a recent article at GigaOM, AT&T showed off the LTE service"s speed, claiming that it will have download speeds of 28.87 Mbps and upload speeds of 10.4 Mbps. That, in theory, will be much faster than Verizon"s own current LTE network which it says can push down between 5 and 12 Mbps for download speeds and upload speeds of up to 5 Mbps. However, Verizon has also got a several month head start on its own LTE network with a large number of cities already live and many more going live in the near future. T-Mobile, which AT&T is trying to acquire at the moment, has also just activated a new and fast wireless network in over 50 cities this week with speeds that it says will reach 42 Mbps on downloads.