Speed thrills

By Troy Wolverton

twolverton@mercurynews.com

LAS VEGAS--Consumers should soon have a wide range of new,speedier and more accessible ways of connecting to the Internetwirelessly.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this week, the major wirelesscarriers announced plans to build out and ramp up their high-speeddata networks and showed off new devices for accessing them. The so-called 4G wireless services are expected to deliver data at ratesfive or more times faster than current network speeds.

The faster networks are needed, given how overloaded currentnetworks are, said Ken Dulaney, an analyst who covers the wirelessindustry for the research group Gartner. They'll allow users "to getmore done in a shorter period of time and get more users on (thenetworks)," he said.

And consumers will have their choice of high-speed networks.Verizon said it will expand its high-speed LTE network, alreadyavailable in about 35 metro areas, to 140 new cities by the end ofthis year. AT&T announced plans to launch its own LTE network by themiddle of this year.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile said it is now offering its own high-speednetwork, using a different technology, in 100 markets nationwide andplans to double the peak speed of that network by the middle of theyear. And Sprint, which is building its own new high-speed dataservice, announced three new, compatible devices, including aversion of Research In Motion's upcoming PlayBook tablet computer.

Wireless data use has been growing rapidly, thanks to smartphones such as Apple's iPhone that allow consumers to access the Weband online services much more easily than previous devices. CiscoSystems and other equipment makers have projected that the amount ofwireless data will double every year over the next several years asmore consumers, using more devices such as tablets and e-readers,connect to the Internet wirelessly.

Some carriers have struggled to keep up with the explosion indata usage. AT&T in particularly has been roundly criticized foraccess problems experienced by customers in New York, San Franciscoand other cities. The new data networks are expected to solve somecongestion issues by increasing the bandwidth available and moreefficiently sharing it. Industry insiders and analysts expect thenew higher-speed data rates to create new uses, such as connectingcars and home security systems to the Internet. They could alsoallow paramedics to transmit video from an accident site.

"(CES) is a good time to get people starting to think about whatthey can do with ubiquitous, high-quality bandwidth," Dulaney said.

That said, the new high-speed data networks may not solve all thecurrent problems and may lead to some of their own. Cisco has saidit expects bandwidth-hogging video data to comprise 90 percent ofInternet traffic by 2013. Similar trends could hold true on mobiledevices, thanks to the rise in videoconferencing on such services asSkype and Apple's FaceTime application.

"We could end up saturating the networks pretty quickly here,"Dulaney said.