Verizon Wireless has completed $240 million in enhancements to its Pennsylvania wireless voice and data network last year, the company announced.
The investment, part of more than $25 billion spent nationwide over the past five years, included adding and updating cell sites and opening a new switching facility in Plymouth Meeting, PA, to improve call handling capacity and call quality, increase coverage and expand advanced data services like wide-area wireless broadband access, electronic and video messaging.
The expenditure included upgrading more than 200 existing cell sites in the Philadelphia region to enable the company's EV-DO high-speed wireless broadband service, called BroadbandAccess. In the Philadelphia area, Verizon Wireless expanded BroadbandAccess to more than 60 percent of the region's population, with plans for additional regional expansion in 2006.
EV-DO, or Evolution-Data Optimized, broadband service may one day provide backhaul of footage shot in the field over broadband Internet connection when paired with store and forward technology. Typical upload speeds can be in the 60kb/s to 100kb/s range; however, a new generation of the technology known as CDMA2000 1xEVDO promises upload speeds of 1.8Mb/s.
