Verizon this morning announced that the fine folks of Parkersburg, WVa., are the proud recipients of its 500th 4G LTE market, and that the rollout of its high-speed data is "substantially complete," blanketing 99 percent of its network. Verizon says more than 95 percent of the U.S. population — some 298 million people — have access to its LTE network. (Though obviously they're not all Verizon customers.)
Some 57 percent of of data Verizon served up is done over its LTE network.
So what's next? Verizon at a press event said its Voice Over LTE network — VoLTE — will start up in earnest in late 2014 with its first all-LTE smartphone. That will mark the beginning of the end of CDMA, though that's going to be a long wind-down. We're talking years.
