While there has been tremendous marketing around 4G, there has...

Mobile Telecom-Advanced designation that will deliver interoperable, 100 Mbps (mobile) broadband speeds, he said. That standard is well beyond what networks are able to do today, he said. The current LTE and WiMAX as well as other so called 4G services don’t fulfill the official standards but are still qualified as 4G, representing substantial improvements from the previous generation of services, he said. In addition to speed, coverage and penetration are two other main factors of a 4G network, he said. Seattle, which is building its own public safety network, plans to deploy 38 cell sites at a cost of $200,000 each, said Bill Schrier, chief technology officer for the city. The network is designed to roam with commercial networks, he said. It’s expected to expand to a four-county region and then to the state of Washington, he said. It will also be part of a proposed nationwide public safety network, he said. He noted West Virginia Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s spectrum bill S-911 was just passed by the Commerce Committee. The bill still needs some advocacy, he said. Meanwhile, it’s important that secondary responders like utilities and transportation agencies would be able to use the public safety network, he said. Jim Hobson, an attorney with Miller & Van Eaton, expects increasing deployment of fiber-to-the-home. There’s a fiber component to the deployment of high speed data network, he said. Wireline will be around for many years for two-way HD applications, Schrier said. Wireless networks, even at 4G speeds, might not have the capacity to handle applications like two-way HDTV, he said.