AT&T and LTE

There were some interesting bits in this article that I think are worth highlighting:

The upgrade to 7.2 Mb/s [HSPA] along with the addition of new HSPA data carriers and removing choke points in the backhaul network will ease many of those problems. But the advent of LTE in 2011 will provide the ultimate antidote. Not only will AT&T be able to deliver far more capacity over the new network, it will be able to deliver it much more efficiently and cheaply. Rinne estimated that the cost of delivering a megabit per second of capacity over LTE was just 3% the cost of delivering that same megabit on an EDGE network, compared to the 14% of the EDGE’s cost on the HSPA network.

Rinne does not define what "cost" is here. I suspect it is spectrum use rather than capital and operating cost, but it is hard to know for sure.