Here are the new markets receiving LTE services: Albemarle, N.C.; Bloomington, Ind.; Charlotte, N.C.; Contra Costa County, Calif.; Denison, Texas; Greeneville, Tenn.; Joplin, Mo.; Kerrville, Texas; Lafayette, Ind.; Lincolnton, N.C.; Los Angeles; Mankato/North Mankato, Minn.; Memphis, Tenn.; Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Newport News, Va.; Palm Bay, Fla.; Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Rochelle, Ill.; Salisbury, N.C.; Shelby, N.C.; Tullahoma, Tenn.; West Palm Beach, Fla.

Sprint now has LTE service in 88 markets (you can see the complete list here), and while many of them are on the small side, the operator is readying some major cities for launch. The operator called out New York City, San Francisco and Washington in Thursday’s announcement, saying customers are already starting to get LTE signals in those cities. In the coming months, Sprint said, it will officially unveil networks in additional 120 cities and towns in coming months.

Sprint is trying to catch up to Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both of which got more than a year’s head start on the No. 3 U.S. operator. Verizon is pretty much finished with its primary LTE network — in its earnings call today that it revealed it has built 4G in 95 percent of its 3G footprint — and it is set to break ground on its second network this year.

Recently AT&T has been turning on new LTE markets in small increments. For instance, on Thursday it said the 4G service has expanded to Cheyenne, Wyo.; Cushing, Okla.; and Florence, S.C. But it plans to make a big push this summer as well, launching in 77 new markets. By the end of the year it plans to have 250 million people under its LTE umbrella, which would put it about 50 million shy of Verizon’s footprint.

Meanwhile T-Mobile’s LTE build is just starting. Its first seven 4G cities went live in March.

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Today’s launch in Chicago; Reno, Nev.; Fresno and Sacramento, Calif.; and the region surrounding Los Angeles (though not in LA itself) – coupled with activations on Monday in Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis – bring its total upgraded footprint to 23 markets covering more than 100 million people. While T-Mobile doesn’t sell the device yet, customers with unlocked iPhones can use them on the carrier’s network. But only in areas where the upgrade is complete will they get anything beyond a 2G connection.

Though in the rest of country the network officially hasn’t seen the upgrade – which will move a portion of T-Mo’s HSPA+ network to the 1900 MHz PCS band – customers with unlocked iPhones have reported seeing HSPA+ signals from New York to LA, cities where their Apple devices would normally be restricted to pokey 2G speeds. Right up to its launch this week, Chicago was a hotbed of signal sightings so T-Mobile obviously has many more markets in the works.

T-Mobile is rushing to complete its network reconfiguration for a number of reasons. Not only will it be fully compatible with the iPhone’s 2G and 3G radios when it starts selling the device next year, but the sooner it relocates HSPA+ to the PCS band, the sooner it can start building its new LTE network.

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Root’s study, which uses a combination of drive and indoor testing as well as crowdsourced data, clocked average downlink speeds on AT&T’s Chicago network at 7.6 Mbps and upload speeds at 4 Mbps. In a recent analysis of 15 major markets Root conducted for GigaOM, the firm found that AT&T was delivering the an average of 17.4 Mbps downstream and 8 Mbps upstream.

That severe drop-off in Chicago is explained by the fact that AT&T has only 10 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum in Chicago while it has 20 MHz in most markets, allowing it to match Verizon hertz for hertz. T-Mobile’s dual-carrier HSPA+ network was almost able to match AT&T’s LTE download performance, though AT&T still won out easily when it came to sending packets the other direction.

Chicago isn’t the only market where AT&T is capacity constrained. Root found an even bigger drop off in speeds in Los Angeles earlier this year. GigaOM contributor and spectrum policy wonk Andrew Shepherd looked at AT&T’s spectrum holdings in its 2012 launch markets, finding that AT&T also is limited to 10 MHz in Oklahoma City; Athens, Ga.; Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.; San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in a handful of smaller markets in Texas and Indiana.

What does it all mean? While AT&T may lose its “fastest network” bragging rights in the spectrum-constrained cities, it’s still capable of delivering a stellar mobile broadband experience. In my own — admittedly unscientific – speed tests in Chicago’s north side and northwest suburbs, I experienced pretty consistent speeds in the city of nearly 6 Mbps down and nearly 4 Mbps up. When I got onto the freeway and out into the burbs those numbers improved considerably. Those links are fast enough to handle with ease anything you could do on a smartphone.

The bigger concern for AT&T is congestion. Its lesser spectrum holdings not only limit the connection to the device, but the overall capacity of its network. If Apple releases an LTE version of the iPhone this year, AT&T will fill up its networks in Chicago with LA with the new smartphones far more quickly than Verizon. Still, AT&T has plenty of recourse when it comes to capacity. It still hasn’t tapped into its Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum, which allows it to layer on much more bandwidth to its 4G networks. Also, AT&T is being more aggressive than most in pursuing new capacity-boosting technologies such as small cells and self-optimizing networks.

Chicago image courtesy of Flickr user Bert Kaufmann

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Chill launched topical collections of videos last week, allowing users to become curators around a certain topic, and co-founder Brian Norgard told me during a meeting in Los Angeles a few days ago that traffic has gone through the roof ever since.

Check out my interview with Norgard below:

Norgard told me that The Ultimate Steve Jobs Collection has been particularly popular; but the site has also seen a lot of long-tail activity for video collections around subjects like track and field or underwater cinematography that are curated by people devoted to the subject. “Everyone is an expert in something,” said Norgard.

Chill raised a $1.5 million round of funding last September. The company currently employs nine people and is located in West Hollywood.

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In New York, AT&T revealed LTE doesn’t cover all of Manhattan, which contains the densest concentration of wireless customers in the country, and is available in only parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. In San Francisco, AT&T said the network is limited to major traffic corridors and the downtown areas of the major Bay area downtowns. AT&T said the expansion in the Bay Area and New York are ongoing, but a quick look at AT&T’s LTE coverage map shows those two metro areas aren’t the only ones to get the partial-footprint treatment. For instance, in Chicago, AT&T has built LTE extensively throughout the northern half of city, downtown and the northern and western suburbs, but left a huge swath of the city’s south side and southern suburbs untouched.

In November, AT&T met its 2011 target of 15 markets, but when it announced plans to begin its rollout in New York, it revealed it was still short of its coverage goal of 70 million. AT&T now appears to have been way off. The LTE service went live Thursday in Austin, Texas; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Oakland,Calif.; Orlando, Fla.; Phoenix; Raleigh, N.C.; San Diego, and San Jose, Calif., as well as NYC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Unless the coverage in those cities adds up to only 4 million pops, then AT&T is just completing its 2011 rollout five days into 2012.

AT&T's LTE footprint in Chicago (dark blue)

That’s not bad, considering the late start AT&T got off to. But it doesn’t help AT&T catch up to its archrival Verizon Wireless, which has already extended LTE coverage to more than 200 million pops, and is live in 190 cities and towns, compared to AT&T’s 26. What’s more, if AT&T continues its pattern of covering markets partially with LTE, it could find itself at huge competitive disadvantage in the key battleground cities of the U.S.

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On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted to officially kill a proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD.  The city’s other 17,000 employees–those outside law enforcement — will keep using Gmail, the Los Angeles Times reported last night.

The council voted unanimously to change the terms of the $7.2 million contract signed in August 2009, to enable LAPD to stick with its existing Novell Groupwise email system, according to the Times’ report.

A source close to the matter said LA renewed the contract for another year in September 2011, with an option to add two more years. And, according to a report to the council, Google’s obligation to fund Groupwise licenses is capped at $350,000 per year for the life of the contract.

Two years ago, the LA-Google deal, with CSC acting as contractor, was trumpeted by Google to show that Google Apps – Gmail, specifically — was ready for use by large organizations. But the LAPD had misgivings about how secure Gmail is. For law enforcement and court officials who must deal with sensitive information — evidence, names of confidential informants, etc. — security is critical. Because the LAPD must communicate with the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, its communications must meet federal Criminal Justice Information Security standards, as well — something no cloud-based mail is yet able to do.

That means the issue  is not as much about Gmail per se as cloud-based email in general, a fact conceded privately by even some Google competitors. A spokeswoman for LA city council president Eric Garcetti reiterated that today. “This is about the security of cloud. There are federal as well as local security requirements that must be met,” she said.

For it’s part, Google  has long maintained that the LAPD inserted new requirements after the contract was inked, stalling deployment.

According to an emailed statement from a Google spokesman:

We’re disappointed that the City introduced requirements for the LAPD after the contract was signed that are, in its own words, ‘currently incompatible with cloud computing’ …  Even so, Los Angeles taxpayers have already saved more than two million dollars and the City expects to save millions more in the years ahead.

Even though this might not be a Gmail issue, the publicity is definitely not good for Google. Google only does cloud-based mail, so if this mess causes other agencies or cities to rethink a move to Google Apps, that hurts the vendor’s efforts. And it could boost competitors like Microsoft and IBM that offer email in both on-premises and cloud-deployment models.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user LifeSupercharger.

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Today, a letter from Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin to Google prime contractor CSC surfaced that shows that the two-year-old deal is more troubled than previously thought.

Dated August 17, 2011, but not public until now,  Levin’s letter stated that since Google/CSC were still unable to fulfill their obligations to provide a secure email and collaboration system, the city will not pay for the police department implementation–which never happened. Consumerwatchdog.org, an advocacy group that has been critical of the LA-Google contract, posted the letter.

The amended  contract requires Google to pay for the police and related agencies to stay on Novell GroupWise till November 2012. Google was already footing the Groupwise bill through June 20, 2011. The cost to Google could be several million dollars. But the blow to Google’s reputation as a provider of safe and secure email and collaboration could be far higher.

LA would still pay for the originally contracted 30,000 seats of Google Apps Premier edition.

Levin’s letter references a May 13 letter to him from CSC stating “CSC indicated it is unable to meet the security requirements of the City and Los Angeles Police Department for all data and information pursuant to the U.S. Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJISS) policy requirements,,” as the reason to amend the contract.

“It’s been two years and Google has still not met the security requirements and the city knows this and yet Google goes aorund the country and world suggesting that its’s experience is one of its greatest success stories,” said John Simpson, director of Consumerwatchdog.org’s privacy project.

The LA- Google deal was used by Google to show that cloud computing in general and Google Apps in particular was ready for primetime use even in security conscious environments. Google beat out Microsoft for the contract.  And it galled some LA area onlookers that Google continued to tout this as a huge success despite the problems it encountered.

Google and the Los Angeles office of the CTO did not return emails and phone calls for comment.

Update:  On Tuesday afternoon, a Google spokesman responded:

“This is just the latest in a long list of press stunts from a group that admits to working closely with our competitors.  We are meeting our commitments to the City of Los Angeles.  Indeed, the City recently renewed their Google Apps contract for 17,000 employees, and the project is expected to save Los Angeles taxpayers millions of dollars.

The City has acknowledged Google Apps is more secure than its current system.  Along the way they’ve also introduced new requirements which require work to implement in a cloud computing environment, and we’ve presented a plan to meet them at no additional cost.”

 Photo courtesy of Flickr user LifeSupercharger

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Or maybe everyone will just go green and stay home, if only for a weekend? Authorities in Los Angeles have been asking celebrities like Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian to tweet about the closure and get people prepared. Airlines have been offering highly discounted flights within Los Angeles, and L.A. major Antonio Villaraigosa has been encouraging people to leave their cars at home entirely. Will it work? Well, we’ll all have a chance to find out, thanks to a number of live streams:

• Caltrans is sharing several traffic camera live streams from freeways around Los Angeles, with each feed switching between cameras every few seconds. Check out multiple cameras along the 5 and 60 freeways, multiple cameras along the 10, 105 and 605 freeways, multiple cameras along the 101 and 110 freeways as well as multiple cameras along the 134 and the closed-off 405 freeway.
• ABC 7 Los Angeles streams its newscast live at 4p.m. and 7p.m. PT.
• Fox LA streams various shows including its morning program Good Day L.A. and its Fox 11 news show online. (4:30a.m. to 11:30pm)

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The first fruit of labors by Los Angeles, Calif. officials to bring business to the city from China-based, Warren Buffett-backed BYD has arrived: The battery giant and electric vehicle developer announced with state and L.A. officials Friday that it will set up headquarters in the downtown business district of the city, creating up to 150 new jobs in 2010 and 2011.

BYD expects to take up occupancy in the fourth quarter of this year on a site once used for a car dealership. The building will house offices as well as a research and development center tasked with developing versions of BYD vehicles for the U.S. market based on models that the company already sells in China, according to a press release from the City of Los Angeles. Previously, BYD has identified the LA area as as a lead market for its planned 2010 launch of the all-electric e6 — the company’s first U.S. offering.

This latest move — a coup for LA — comes on the heels of BYD revealing plans to to break into the home energy market with a suite of products including solar panels, battery packs, car charging points, LED lighting systems and energy management devices, CNET reports.

A bigger prize for Los Angeles could be the establishment of a BYD assembly plant in the area. But BYD Chairman Wang Chuan-fu told reporters Friday that the company is waiting to see how the U.S. market shapes up before deciding whether to set up an assembly facility.

“We hope, eventually, to have the car assembly plants and their suppliers come here,” Austin Beutner, economic development chief for Los Angeles and former head of private equity firm Evercore Partners, explained to the Contra Costa Times today.”The key is how for every one job they create, there are five others being created.”

BYD, which plans to show its vehicle lineup at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting this weekend, says it sold nearly 450,000 vehicles in 2009. Sales of the company’s plug-in hybrid model, the F3DM, came in well below the company’s ambitious sales targets for 2009. But in 2010 the company predicts it will sell a total of 700,000 vehicles.

Southern California has been building momentum in recent months toward a significant role in the growing EV ecosystem: the launchpad, where some of the earliest plug-in vehicle models will roll out to customers, and where many of EV-related challenges for the power grid will be figured out.

Plug-in car startups have already put down roots in the area, and are slated to set up manufacturing there. Fisker Automotive, Coda Automotive and Aptera are all headquartered in SoCal. And AC Propulsion, which first developed the prototypical technology that evolved into the Tesla Roadster, calls San Dimas home, about 30 miles east of Los Angeles.

Tesla Motors, while based in Silicon Valley, will likely assemble its planned Model S in the Long Beach area, making use of facilities once used for the region’s aerospace industry. Coda aims to have the bulk of its upcoming electric sedan built in China, but complete final assembly in Los Angeles County.

It’s not just startups figuring into the SoCal auto economy. Los Angeles serves as the U.S. home base for a slew of Japanese automakers, including Honda, Toyota and Mistubishi. But as the L.A. Economic Development Agency put it in comprehensive 2006 report on the region’s automotive sector, “The auto industry in Los Angeles involves everything except assembling passenger cars.” Plug-in cars could eventually help to fill that gap. But it’s too early to tell if the region can parlay its first deal with BYD into a larger investment, and if BYD’s bet on electric cars for the U.S. market pays off.

Images courtesy of BYD

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