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CTO Dick Lynch on Verizon LTE Coverage
Written by Dave Burstein   
Saturday, 02 April 2011 17:19
Verizon_mapDick Lynch broke the news at Barcelona 2009 that Verizon would go LTE at a very fast pace.
"Once the initial rollout is complete, plans are in place for aggressive deployment throughout Verizon Wireless’ entire network, including areas not currently covered by the existing Verizon Wireless footprint."
They provided a figure of 92% network coverage at the time.

He indicated the goal is ubiquity
"Once this initial rollout is complete, we expect to aggressively expand this footprint, with a goal of covering all of our 700 MHz licensed territories by 2015."
(They have 700 MHz licensed across the U.S. inxcluding Hawaii but not Alaska 2008 C- Block license.)

Lynch's subsequent interview with Maggie Reardon of CNET added that the buildout would keep going rather than stopping.
"So initially there will be some subset of the entire country with 4G coverage, and we will expand that coverage every year."

April, 2010 Lynch explicitly set 2013 goals of 285M pops and that they would go well beyond that in 2014
"As promised, we will have 25-30 markets in service this year covering 100 million people, or approximately 1/3 of the U.S. population.  We plan to aggressively expand from there.  We're aiming to double our coverage to 200 million in early 2012, and then reach approximately 285 million people by the end of 2013.  To give you a visual, in 2013, everywhere we have 3G coverage on our map today we'll have LTE coverage - and even some places where we don't have 3G coverage we'll have LTE.  Because of our spectrum allocation, we can anticipate 2014 bringing even more coverage than our current 3G footprint, which we know is, by far, the best in the country."

October, 2010 Lynch confirmed "almost all." By then, he had experience gained from deploying 100M pops.
"We'll move aggressively to expand. We're on track for LTE to reach two-thirds of the U.S. population in 18 months, in 2012.  And we'll quickly expand that to cover almost all of the U.S. population by the end of 2013."
The Census Bureau estimates U.S. population 22:47 UTC (EST+5) Apr 02, 2011 is 311,092,442.  285 / 311 = 0.916398714