On Wednesday it announced a list of 22 new markets receiving the LTE upgrade, and last week it took its new network live in another 11. Apart from a few more recognizable burgs like Colorado Springs, Co.; Olympia and Spokane, Wash.; and Fort Wayne, Ind.; you can be forgiven for not knowing many of the towns on these lists. Batesville, Ark., doesn’t host any professional sports teams.

AT&T’s goal is to reach 250 million people covered by the end of the year, which will mean covering a lot of smaller cities and towns. It’s planning 77 new market launches this summer alone. To put it in perspective, Verizon has launched LTE in 491 markets, yet it’s footprint encompasses 287 million people. From here on out, we’re going to see AT&T add hundreds of more names to its coverage list, but each new name will only add incremental gains to its total population covered.

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Update: Hold on. Verizon at its earning call just revealed it it sold 316,000 651,000 iPhone 5 units in the final weeks of the third quarter. So while the iPhone 5 did have an impact on quarterly LTE activations, it’s not responsible for a 1 million-plus boost in sales. Verizon sold 3.1 million iPhones in total in the quarter, most of which were previous generation 3G devices.

While Verizon didn’t report specific iPhone 5 sales numbers, Typically its quarterly iPhone activations match or exceed its total LTE activations. Last quarter Verizon sold 3.2 million LTE devices, and in the quarter before it sold 2.9 million. In those same periods, Verizon sold 3.2 million and 2.7 million iPhones respectively – all counted as 3G devices.

With the marriage of LTE and the iPhone, Verizon is expecting its 4G network to take over the bulk of its data traffic. Verizon now has 14.9 million LTE devices on its network, which is still relatively small compared to its total retail subscriber base of 96 million, but those 14.9 million consume 35 percent of Verizon’s mobile data traffic. With the iPhone 5’s introduction, Verizon expects LTE will soon start hosting a majority of its data traffic.

Correction: A previous version of this post stated Verizon has had sold 316,000 iPhone 5s in the third quarter. The correct number is 651,000.

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In a few months 4G traffic will increase to 50 percent of the total, Palmer said. Though she didn’t go into details on why they expect such a huge jump in such a short period, it’s easy to guess the reason. The iPhone 5 is the first iteration of the iconic Apple device to sport LTE radios. As Verizon sells millions of new iPhones leading up the holidays, Verizon will begin shifting the iPhone’s huge data load from its 3G CDMA networks to LTE.

Palmer also said that Verizon will hit its 2012 goals for coverage on Oct. 18, when it will launch its 400^th market, Marquette, Mich. In 2013, Verizon will largely be filling in the gaps between cities and towns, and by the end of that year, Verizon’s LTE network will be everywhere its current 3G EV-DO network operates, Palmer said.

In 2013, Verizon will also begin deploying its second 4G network over the airwaves it just bought from its new cable partners. Palmer said Verizon has already started laying the groundwork for that launch, but the doubling in network capacity that would accompany the upgrade won’t begin until mid next year, she said.

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The results may not surprise, as Keynote Systems is a San Mateo, CA-based mobile web monitoring company. But in speaking to many mobile users on my own, most do cite slow page load times as a challenge; particularly over mobile broadband. So I dug a little deeper into the survey results to see what other interesting insights might surface. It turns out that when looking at which activities both devices are used for, some of the data addresses my idea of tablets potentially replacing smartphones.

Last week I had said that there were very few activities that were actually better on a phone than on a tablet and Keynote’s survey results indicate what some of those might be. Social networking is one such activity — 46 percent of smartphone users update their networks while only 31 percent do so on a tablet. These updates are small chunks of content, so I could see why one might reach for a phone first.

Maps was another such activity, which I find semi-surprising. Half  of the respondents prefer to access navigation and maps from a phone while only 3o percent prefer doing so on a tablet. Map experiences are far richer on a larger display, but not all tablets have the constant connectivity and GPS functionality found in phones. And if you want navigation and directions, a handheld device works just fine.

As I noted prior, digital media content consumption on a tablet often provides a better experience and the Keynote survey data echoes that thought: 76 percent of tablet owners watch videos, while 59 percent do so on their smartphone. Other activities where a tablet is used more? Reading news or entertainment; product and services research; reading 0r posting to blogs; and online purchases to name a few.

One other interesting note came from the Keynote survey in this regard: Tablet users are skewed towards spending longer amounts of time browsing the web with their device than smartphone owners do with theirs. According to the data, a whopping 60 percent do so for an hour or less per day on a smartphone, compared to 45 percent on a tablet. For one to two hours of web browsing, 29 percent do so on a phone while 37 percent do on a tablet. And the percentage of tablet owners browsing for 2 to 3 hours is nearly double that of smartphone owners: 12 percent vs 7 percent.

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Ting, which is owned by webhosting company Tucows, has started taking pre-orders for the device and will begin shipping them to customers in three to six weeks. That Ting is getting LTE phones is no surprise – Ting revealed it would back in April. What’s surprising is that it’s happening so soon and that Ting gets immediate access to such a high-profile device. The S III has only been available on Sprint’s network for only a month.

MVNOs pay network operators wholesale rates for voice and data, which they then offer to consumers usually at big discounts over the big carriers. But MVNOs also have to agree to contract stipulations that prevent them from venturing too far onto their partners’ turf. Typically that means reserving newer network technologies and also a restriction on what devices an MVNO can sell. For instance, AT&T won’t let any of its resellers offer a device currently in its portfolio. And with the exception of Sprint, no carrier is giving their MVNOs to their newest, fastest networks.

Sprint, however, has aggressively courted MVNOs, even going so far as to create a build-your-own-MVNO kit, which allows new virtual operators to come online as quickly as possible. In a recent interview with GigaOM, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss said Sprint is well ahead of any other U.S. operator when it comes to its wholesale policies, which ultimately led Ting to select the operator. “Our view on AT&T and Verizon is that they come to wholesale very begrudgingly and they will do only as much as the market forces them to,” Noss said.

Ting will offer the phone without a subsidy, meaning customers will have to fork over the full $529 retail price for the 16 GB version and $579 for the 32 GB version. But customers will likely be more than compensated for that upfront investment through Ting’s innovative pricing plans.

Ting flouts the typical carrier billing model by not requiring customers to commit to specific buckets of voice, text and data each month. Customers do sign up for tiers of minutes, SMS and data, but if they use less than their plans’ allotments in a given month, Ting credits them for the unused portions on their next bills. According to Noss, Ting’s savviest customers merely select zero in all three categories and just pay for what they consume each month.

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Those iPhone sales represent a 17 percent increase over the 2.3 million Verizon sold in last year’s second quarter, its first full quarter as an iPhone distributor. In the first quarter, Verizon sold 3.2 million of the devices. But at the beginning of the year the iPhone 4S was still relatively new, while in the spring and early summer anticipation started building for the new iPhone being released this fall.

Verizon’s results almost certainly prove wrong William Blair analyst Anil Doradla’s report that Motorola’s Droid Razr was outselling the iPhone 4S at Verizon, making it the carrier’s top device. Unless a disproportionate number of Verizon customers eschewed the iPhone 4S in favor of the iPhone 4 or the vast majority of Android smartphone sales were for the Razr Maxx, the math just doesn’t work.

Though the iPhone remained dominant, Verizon still made a lot of progress toward migrating its customer base to 4G. Verizon activated 3.2 million LTE devices in total, including tablets, modems and hotspots; and 42 percent of all smartphones sold contained an LTE radio. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said 18 percent of Verizon’s smartphone base now is on the 4G network. And given that Verizon’s smartphone penetration is now 50 percent, that means it has managed to convert nearly 10 percent of its subscriber base to 4G in a little more than a year.

On Wednesday, Verizon added another 33 smaller markets to its 4G footprint and expanded its networks in 32 markets, bringing its total coverage to 337 cities and roughly 75 percent of the U.S. population. Verizon plans to close the year with 400 markets covered.

As Shammo pointed out on the call, LTE is a far more efficient mobile broadband technology than CDMA, offering not just greater speeds but much more overall capacity. But if LTE is really Verizon’s future it will need to accelerate its 4G conversion rate, which will be awfully difficult until Apple ships an LTE version of the iPhone. It doesn’t help either that Verizon is making exceptions for old friends like RIM, which just introduced a new 3G-only BlackBerry on Big Red’s network.

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Stoke is hardly a new startup. It raised its Series A round back in 2004 from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Since then it’s racked up about $97 million, yet has remained relatively quiet except for a high-profile deal with DoCoMo in 2009. But Stoke may have just been waiting for the industry to catch up to its technology.

Stoke makes complex gateways that serve several functions on a mobile carrier’s 3G or 4G network: they can aggregate millions of cellular radio or Wi-Fi nodes, provide secure encryption for normally vulnerable IP LTE data traffic, and can shunt, or offload, over-the-top application traffic to the Internet before it clogs up the network core. Regardless of which use case or cases a carrier adopt the gateway’s central mission to is the handle the enormous deluge of mobile data traffic the smartphone has wrought.

Stoke first started selling its gateway as a 3G mobile data offload element, but couldn’t find any carrier interested, said Dan McBride, VP of marketing for Stoke. Carriers were experiencing enormous traffic spikes from the iPhone and Android devices, but they all said they weren’t interested in investing any more in 3G with LTE on the horizon, McBride said. So Stoke shifted gears and started positioning its product as a femtocell gateway and an LTE security and aggregation platform.

Femtocells didn’t exactly go gangbusters, but Stoke did begin winning LTE deals. The vendor has racked up 14 LTE contracts globally, McBride said, though apart from DoCoMo he wouldn’t reveal with whom. What’s more, with Wi-Fi’s new popularity among operators and the advent of small cells, McBride feels the marketplace doors are swinging wider. AT&T and Sprint are hinting at large-scale small cell deployments and wireline and wireless operators alike are bulking up on Wi-Fi access points– they will need something to secure and direct all of that traffic.

While Samsung’s cash is welcome, it wasn’t necessary to keep Stoke going, as it has been profitable for 18 months, McBride said. “It’s not the money that’s important – it’s not about operational funding,” McBride said. “It’s solely to bring us closer to Samsung.”

Samsung has made the rather audacious pledge to become a top three mobile infrastructure maker globally – a claim that would be almost laughable if it weren’t for some recent high-profile LTE wins such as Sprint’s Network Vision deal. If Samsung can really go the distance though — displacing half a dozen industry giants in the process – then Stoke would certainly enjoy the free ride.

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Pioneer Cellular has added a small but notable entry to the growing list of LTE networks in the U.S. Telecompetitor reports Pioneer’s LTE service has gone live in six counties in Oklahoma, making it the first of Verizon’s “LTE in Rural America” partners to turn on its network.

The program is all part of the Verizon Wireless master plan to get accelerate the usually slow slog of new technology from urban to rural areas by recruiting rural operators to do the work. Verizon essentially owns a nationwide LTE license in the upper 700 MHz band, and while it plans to build its own 4G network covering 260 million people in the big and small cities, it’s leasing its airwaves in rural regions to about a dozen small operators. Those carriers will help Verizon fill in the gaping holes between the urban regions.

Rural operators like Pioneer get a lot out of the deal. They’re often the ones that failed to win 4G licenses, making the Rural America program their easiest path to 4G, but more importantly they get an automatic roaming partner in Verizon, which plans to leverage their networks to expand its LTE coverage in exchange. Smaller operators that own their own spectrum will find their roaming options limited due to interoperability problems in the 700 MHz bands.

Verizon is also in the center of a powerful device ecosystem. By virtue of using the same spectrum as Verizon, Pioneer and other Rural America partners can use the same devices. According to Telecompetitor, Pioneer is launching with a home broadband router, a MiFi hotspot and a dongle but no smartphones. Technically though, making any Verizon device compatible with Pioneer’s network will mean a mere software tweak. We may even see the new 4G iPad make its way to rural Oklahoma LTE networks before it appears on an LTE network in Europe or Asia.

Tower Image courtesy of Flickr user Nikhil Verma

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LightSquared is set to default on its debt today, which would send the company into bankruptcy. Its lenders, which include activist investor Carl Icahn, appear willing to give LightSquared some breathing room, but their big condition was that Falcone must  go, even though his hedge fund Harbinger Capital owns 96 percent of the company’s equity.

Reuters reported that Icahn and LightSquared’s other bondholders feel that Falcone is a liability in the would-be carrier’s negotiations with the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate the waiver it needs to deploy its 4G network across the U.S. Without the waiver, LightSquared’s dreams of being a wholesale provider of cheap mobile broadband capacity would evaporate and it would be forced to remain a satellite provider.

The FCC originally granted LightSquared a terrestrial network waiver on the condition LightSquared’s network wouldn’t interfere with GPS devices, which use a nearby band, but mounting evidence that such interference would occur and increasing pressure from the GPS lobby, government agencies and even Congress led the FCC to yank that waiver, pending a public comment period. LightSquared’s remaining hope is to convince the FCC to reconsider its decision or talk the commission into granting alternate spectrum in a less controversial band.

Even with Falcone gone, neither option has much chance of succeeding. The FCC would face tremendous backlash if it approved any network that could potentially interfere with millions of commercial, industrial and government GPS devices. If the FCC gave LightSquared new spectrum, the government would essentially be bailing Falcone out of a bad financial bet, encouraging future operators to speculate on spectrum rather than deploying networks over it.

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Verizon is targeting smaller markets and closing the remaining gaps in its already existing metro footprint, bringing LTE service to regions so far overlooked by mobile broadband and providing more consistent and persistent data connections to areas that already have access to it. According to Verizon spokesman Tom Pica, Verizon is adding more LTE cell sites in big and small cities, expanding its existing metro footprints to incorporate outlying suburbs and exurbs and adding coverage along highways between nearby cities and towns. In some cases, it’s filling in gaps between cities entirely, creating dense clusters of 4G coverage, particularly along the Eastern seaboard.

Those efforts have already begun to show in its recent network speed tests. In an analysis for GigaOM, mobile testing firm RootMetrics found that while AT&T’s LTE network has begun to surpass Verizon’s in overall average connection speeds, Big Red’s NETWORK is providing far more reliable access to LTE than AT&T in 15 cities surveyed.

With the 27 new markets, Verizon will have LTE in 230 metro areas and towns, Those, coupled with its recent upgrades in 44 existing cities, will officially put it over the two-thirds population coverage mark. Verizon doesn’t plan to stop there, though. By the end of the year, it plans to have 4G whirring away in 400 markets, covering a total population of 260 million.

The markets launching Thursday are: Auburn and Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Pine Bluff, Siloam Springs and Van Buren, Ark.; Visalia/Porterville, Calif.; Fort Walton Beach and Ocala, Fla.; Brunswick, LaGrange and Macon/Warner Robins, Ga.; Peoria, Ill.; Kokomo/Logansport and Marion, Ind.; Dodge City, Garden City, Great Bend and Hays, Kan.; Salisbury, Md.; Cattaraugus/Allegany, N.Y.; Sandusky, Ohio; Ardmore and Ponca City, Okla.; Salem/Albany/Corvallis, Ore.; Pierre, S.D.; and Big Springs and Tyler, Texas.

The markets receiving expanded LTE coverage are: Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz.; Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento, Salinas/Monterey, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo and Stockton, Calif.; Colorado Springs and Fort Collins/Loveland, Colo.; Sarasota/Bradenton, Fla.; Boise/Nampa, Idaho; Carbondale/Marion and Rockford, Ill.; Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Ind.; Des Moines, Iowa; Boston and Worcester, Mass.; Detroit, Mich.; St. Louis, Mo.; Las Vegas and Reno, Nev.; Manchester/Nashua, N.H.; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M.; Buffalo/Niagara Falls and New York, N.Y.; Akron, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla.; Portland, Ore.; Providence/Pawtucket, R.I.; Nashville, Tenn.; El Paso, Texas; Provo/Orem and Salt Lake City/Ogden, Utah; and Olympia/Centralia and Spokane, Wash.

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