Cricket to launch its first LTE trial market shortly

In today’s world where 4G LTE seems to be everything – it’s no surprise that even the smaller carriers are hopping on the bandwagon. At the conference call for Cricket’s latest quarterly results, Doug Hutchenson, the carrier’s CEO reported that they were on track to introducing its very own LTE network. Cricket has plans to bring LTE to 25 million potential customers by the end of 2012, and will continue to expand two-thirds of the current footprint by the next 2-3 years.

No mention of where the rollout is going to begin, but Cricket did mention that it was ready to launch its first LTE trial market “shortly”. And just like the other carriers that recently launched their LTE networks as well, Cricket will only begin rolling out LTE smartphones in the middle of 2012 – which means it won’t be launching with LTE-capable devices right away. I guess it’s always better to gauge the performance of a network before letting everyone onboard.

Anybody planning to use Cricket’s LTE network when it goes live next year?