People who depend on their smartphones for mobile internet access might have guessed Verizon was upgrading its network in large cities like New York, San Franci

People who depend on their smartphones for mobile internet access might have guessed Verizon was upgrading its network in large cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago before the announcement of XLTE this week. Verizon didn’t just turn on XLTE today; it’s been testing for months and you might have noticed. At the Moscone Center for the RSA Conference, Verizon customers with an AWS-compatible smartphone saw LTE speeds at 53 Mbps downstream and 24 Mbps upstream and faster. This is counterintuitive because data-hungry attendees at tech venues like the Moscone Center use up the Wi-Fi capacity first, and then flood the 3G and 4G capacity. Experiencing these speeds during the RSA conference tipped Verizon's hand.