In an interview with Stacey Higginbotham of Giga Om, President and CEO of AT&T Operations, John Stankey revealed that AT&T plans to move from HSPA 7.2 (7.2Mbps maximum download) to a newer version HSPA+ that will offer 14Mbps download speed (about 7Mbps in real world). He added that the 3G-network upgrade would be completed by end of this year offering HSPA+ access to 250 million customers.

According to John, the HSPA+ upgrade will cost less than $10 million, as the HSPA+ deployment is mostly software only upgrade requiring very little investment in hardware. AT&T will use this upgrade as a stopgap measure before starting LTE network deployment in second half of 2011. John believes that even though companies like Verizon plan to start LTE service in 2010 the LTE network won’t go mainstream until 2014. He said, “The vendors are experiencing some challenges on certain features and software, and first implementations in 2011 will be pretty vanilla.”

AT&T’s HSPA+ upgrade will offer 7Mbps download speed and 3.5Mbps upload speed in real world, which will be comparable to the download speeds offered by Verizon’s LTE network (5-12Mbps) and Sprint’s WiMAX network (5-7Mbps) giving AT&T time till problems related to LTE are ironed out.
[Via Giga Om]