Verizon Wireless plans to use its recently won spectrum on the 700MHz band to deploy a nationwide Long Term Evolution network for wireless broadband.

Verizon, which selected LTE as its 4G technology late last year, says it hopes to launch its LTE network by 2010, one year after the spectrum is vacated by broadcasting companies that are switching from analog to digital signals.

"We now have sufficient spectrum to continue growing our business and data revenues well into… the next decade," says Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam. "This is the very best spectrum with excellent propagation and in-building characteristics."

Verizon bid more than $4.7 billion to win nearly all of the licenses on the coveted chunk of open-access spectrum, dubbed the "C block" by the FCC. The 22MHz chunk of spectrum garnered significant attention last year when the FCC placed open-access rules on it mandating that future licensees would be prohibited from blocking or slowing Internet traffic from competing carriers using the network. The FCC also said the C-Block winner would have to allow any devices to connect to the network.

LTE is a modulation technique designed for GSM/UMTS-based technology that uses OFDM and MIMO, and is expected to be the next big standard for mobile broadband. During last week’s CTIA Wireless conference, Japanese wireless carrier DoCoMo announced that its trial LTE system reached download speeds of up to 250Mbps. Previous LTE trial runs had achieved download speeds ranging from 45M to 144Mbps

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