AT&T has recently announced the launch of 11 new 4G LTE markets bringing their total up to 26 available 4G LTE locations. While this isn’t nearly close to what Verizon’s rollout has seen, it’s a good start and things are slowly starting to look up for AT&T’s LTE aspirations. AT&T claims to be reaching 74 million customers.

Flipping the 4G LTE switch we now have access to the blazing fast speeds in a few key cities for AT&T. Those include NYC and San Francisco in particular — but it has also been enabled in Austin, Chapel Hill, Los Angeles, Oakland, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, San Diego, and San Jose. This news has been a long time coming and ever since AT&T first started their rollout things have been moving quite slowly. We’ve been hearing reports of AT&T LTE live in NYC for more than a few weeks already but now that everything is ready to go and stable, the announcements are official.

AT&T promises to continue with their widespread 4G LTE rollout and expects it to be fully completed inside of 2013. Reaching 74 million American’s and just getting started means they’ll be passing 100m and more very soon. If they start updating as fast as Verizon has recently things should be even better in a few short months. AT&T also is the only carrier offering both 4G LTE and HSPA+ “faux 4G” speeds for what they are calling a double-layer 4G experience. When users aren’t in an LTE location they’ll be rolled back to AT&T’s wide HSPA+ spectrum across the entire USA.

With a few awesome LTE devices already in the Skyrocket and HTC Vivid, and more to surely be announced at CES next week AT&T should be looking bright and blue for 2012. Stay tuned as we’ll get all the details from AT&T live at CES shortly.

[via SlashGear]