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In an interview conducted by Engadget at MWC, Ralf de la Vega defended his company's 3G network in comparison to rivals and described how the company worked with handset makers to improve reliability. He specifically cited Apple, noting, "we communicate with Apple and say, you know, if we tweak this it would work better, so they've been very good about working with us and making sure that as we look at things to do the drop calls there, they're going to implement it."

On its end, AT&T has now rolled out 3G service to more than 350 cities. The company is also in the middle of completing a frequency band transition from 1900MHz to 850MHz in several markets. By the end of 2009, de la Vega said, "we'll finish [the 850MHz transition in] San Francisco, we'll finish parts of New York, and then that'll bring the best technology 3G on the best backbone to significantly improve the quality and the coverage for 3G on our network." AT&T uses both 850MHz and 1900MHz bands for 3G UMTS in the US.

Last June, Kris Rinne, AT&T's Senior Vice President of Architecture and Planning, was cited in an industry press release as saying, "AT&T has delivered HSPA service at 850MHz wherever possible, with more on the way this year as we redeploy additional 850 spectrum previously used for our TDMA network," indicating a continuation of the company's often repeated strategy of deploying additional 850MHz coverage to strengthen its 3G service in the US.

"We're also looking to improve the speeds of our 3G network," de la Vega said in the interview. "As I mentioned before, we have the infrastructure capability to go to 7.2Mbps, and we'll have the capability to go 14.4 and 21 in the next couple of years, so I think there's coverage we're going to improve, there's quality we're going to improve, and there's speed that's also going to get improved."

Just as AT&T's 2G GSM network was enhanced with the EDGE upgrade, its parallel 3G UMTS service is being upgraded using HSPA. The current upgrade phase, as defined by the 3GPP is Release 5, which is targeted to reach peak data rates of 14.4 Mbps.

When asked if he was worried by Verizon's need to be "the first to upgrade to LTE before AT&T just because their technology path is at a dead end right now," de la Vega answered, "I think we're much better off to say that they [Verizon] don't have a way to improve the majority of their footprint for the next year, because they're going to have to build a whole new network nationwide. We don't have to build the new network."

"We've already got HSPA [networks built out] and when we go to Release 7," de la Vega said, "we can go all the way up to 20 megabits per second, so I think for the next couple of years, AT&T will have the best and the fastest 3G network in the country while Verizon and others are continuing to look for what to do with LTE or WiMAX or whatever they decide to do."

"We think that LTE, for us, will be in the 2010, 2011 time frame. We are, right now, capable of taking our network and improving the speed of it up to 20 megabits per second. So we think that carries us through the next year, year and a half, then I think you begin to look at LTE as the next step."

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