When the dust cleared from last year's 700MHz spectrum auction, Verizon was the biggest winner. The telecom shelled out billions of dollars in order to lay claim to a swath of spectrum covering the whole nation. Over a year later and just a couple of months shy of analog television broadcasts relinquishing the spectrum, Verizon is promising to put its 700MHz holdings to good use by bringing wireless broadband to rural markets.

Speaking at the CTIA Wireless 2009 tradeshow in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Verizon SVP and CTO Tony Melone promised that its 700MHz spectrum holdings will be used to deliver the 4G goods to areas the company has yet to reach with its 3G network. "[W]e plan to roll out LTE throughout the entire country, including places where we don't offer our CDMA cell phone service today," Melone told Cnet at CTIA.

Verizon has been one of LTE's biggest backers—along with AT&T—as the standard moves towards ratification and then deployment. Verizon promises that LTE will be available in at least two US cities on a trial basis by the end of the year. The company plans to make the 4G tech available in an additional 25 to 30 markets during 2010.

Blanketing major metropolitan areas with LTE is well and good, but the biggest broadband need in the US is getting it to underserved rural areas. It's a focus of the recently-passed economic stimulus package, and former FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein will be overseeing rural broadband development in his new role as the head of the USDA's Rural Utilities Service. The RUS will have $2.5 billion to spend on rural broadband deployment, with stimulus money doled out to projects focused on building out broadband infrastructure in areas that are at least 75 percent rural.

Laying physical infrastructure is costly, however. It's one thing to wire a new suburban subdivision with fiber, as Verizon has done in numerous communities within its FiOS footprint. It's quite another to run wiring to homes and businesses in sparsely populated areas.

4G is a real alternative to wired broadband technologies like DSL, cable, and broadband-over-powerline, as it promises significantly higher speeds than current 3G tech. LTE provides a pool of 50Mbps to 100Mbps to be shared by users in an individual cell, which Verizon says will translate into 5Mbps to 10Mbps of downstream bandwidth for individual users.

LTE's foe is WiMAX, backed primarily by Sprint in the US, and a handful of other providers worldwide. WiMAX maxes out at 12Mbps for individual users, but Sprint and ClearWire subscribers will likely see speeds in the 2-4Mbps range. The primary advantage WiMAX has over LTE is that it's here now—well, sort of. It's currently available in Portland, Oregon and Baltimore, with a whole slew of metropolitan areas scheduled to be covered by the end of the year. Of course, a few of those cities—including Chicago—were supposed to be serviced by WiMAX at this point in 2008. But cellular deployments are often delayed, and it may be that Verizon is overly optimistic about having LTE deployments up and running over the next twelve months.

No matter which technology wins out—and an executive at former WiMAX supporter Nokia recently dissed WiMAX by comparing it to Betamax—it's going to be at least a couple of years before most rural US residents will be served by one 4G technology or the other.

Listing image by Eric Bangeman