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There’s something to be said for the company that goes its own way. That, despite its status as the No. 5 operator in a market, decides that they’re going to do their own thing, no matter what their competitors decide. Unfortunately, such a maneuver could kill you in the wireless industry. And so Alltel has committed to LTE to drive their 4G platform. It’s not like it was a hard choice. AT&T and Verizon chose it, which means that all the top handsets are going to feature LTE technology. Why purposely separate yourself from such a potentially robust market?

Alltel’s COO Jeff Fox warns that LTE might be a bit further off with his company, though. Lack of funding was the reason given that we might not see Alltel transition for another three to five years.

The company also announced their first quarter numbers, noting gross subscriber additions of about a million. Of course, you have to figure in churn, which brought the net additions to 385,000. Still, that’s up 63 percent from last year. That’s due to a low 1.34 percent churn. Their subscribers now total over 13 million.

At least one outlet is wondering what might have been if Sprint had acquired Alltel rather than Nextel, whose customers now total 12.1 million.

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