AT&T recently announced that it will be rolling out its 4G LTE network in the following five U.S cities this summer: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. It also revealed that it plans to add ten or more cities in the second half of the year. Back in January, AT&T’s CEO De la Vega revealed that AT&T plans to accelerate the deployment of its 4G LTE network this year instead of 2012. As per AT&T’s statement: AT&T has delivered five mobile broadband speed upgrades in recent years, including our HSPA+ deployment last year. And average nationwide speeds on the AT&T network have increased – more than 40 percent over the past two years alone. The next network evolution will arrive this summer with the addition of LTE in five markets – Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio. We plan to add another 10 or more markets in the second half of the year, and cover 70 million Americans with LTE by year-end. We also have plans to add 20 4G devices to our robust device portfolio this year, with some of those being LTE capable. Just last week, Stacey Higginbotham from GigaOM who got a chance to test AT&T’s 4G LTE network reported that she got download speeds of approximately 28.87 Mbps, and an upload speed of 10.4 Mbps, which is quite promising. Before everyone gets all excited though, it is important to note here that it is highly unlikely that Apple will launch a 4G LTE iPhone this year to take advantage of AT&T’s faster network, as the implementation for LTE networks has not yet matured. AT&T and Verizon are expected to complete the rollout of their 4G LTE network nationwide only by 2013. Apple executives have indicated that they are not willing to take a lot of design compromises, which are enforced by the current-generation 4G LTE chipsets. Chipmakers like Qualcomm, ST Ericsson, and Intel are expected to launch the next generation chips towards the end of this year, which are expected to meet Apple’s requirements. Therefore, Apple is widely speculated to launch a 4G LTE iPhone in 2012. Will you wait for Apple to launch a 4G iPhone or will you buy some other 4G smartphone if there is a 4G network available in your area? Let us know what you think in the comments section below! In the mean time, stay tuned for more tech news and info by following us on Facebook, Twitter and/or by subscribing to our RSS Feed. Read More Authors: