AT&T today announced that they finished updating all their U.S. cell sites to HSPA 7.2. The upgrades will allow AT&T cell sites to transmit at twice their previous speeds…but wait, oh, only in a few cities right now (neither Las Vegas or Reno is one of the test cities).
Even though the cell sites have been upgraded, the backhaul network serving those cell sites do not have sufficient capacity for the additional bandwidth.
From Techcrunch: “The key to getting AT&T’s network up to the 7.2Mbps speed is upgrading its backhaul connections. That’s what AT&T is currently doing in the cities where it is testing the faster speeds, and it says it will continue rolling that out to more markets in 2010, and complete it in 2011.”
We’ve previously written on our blog about how millimeter-wave wireless fiber can help solve the mobile backhaul bottleneck.
