Verizon CTO Dick Lynch told a press conference today that the US operator is well on track to launch commercial LTE services this year amid wide industry recognition that development of compatible handsets is ahead of schedule.

“We’re in Phase 4 of trialwork,” he said. “Within the next sixty days Boston and Seattle will be fully passed in testing. We will then be ready to go to our vendors and say we are ready to move into commercial deployment in a big way.”

The US operator has promised to launch commercial LTE services in 25 to 30 markets this year, making it one of the first commercial deployments (and, arguably, most high-profile) in the world. At last year’s Mobile World Congress Lynch announced Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson as the vendor’s radio access network suppliers.

Initial LTE devices will be USB dongles and datacards, with handsets following. However, Lynch noted that “we have seen more interest in development of chipsets and devices than we originally thought – we underestimated it.”

This view is supported by other major players. “There will be [LTE] handsets available earlier than we initially thought,” said Vivek Badrinath, chairman of the NGMN Alliance. 

“Handsets are coming faster than we anticipated,” agreed Ericsson CTO, Hakan Eriksson.