The two carriers' positions reflect their disparate plans for LTE, according to Nadine Manjaro, a wireless analyst at ABI Research. Verizon is more anxious to gain control of its 700MHz frequencies and roll out LTE because it has less room to grow on its current 3G network, she said. That network, based on EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) technology, has a theoretical maximum downstream speed of just 3.1Mb per second for a band 5GHz wide. AT&T is using HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which can deliver as much as 48Mb per second in the same size band, she said. (The carriers control how that capacity is divided up among individual subscribers.)

With its goal of starting LTE rollouts this year, Verizon has good reason to oppose an extension of the deadline, Manjaro said. The carrier will be deploying a new technology on frequencies it's never used before, on top of having to work out coverage issues for a flagship network. If analog TV stations linger in areas where Verizon is building or testing a network, that could hold back the project.

"It's going to be challenging enough for them to roll out LTE without those issues," Manjaro said. "You never know, when you roll out a network, what the problems are going to be."

One possible solution would be to force a transition to digital TV early in the one or two markets where Verizon first wants to make LTE available, Manjaro said, though that could run into its own political complications.

Before Sprint Nextel launched its first commercial WiMax network in Baltimore at the end of September 2008, it spent months building and testing the networks in its initial target cities. Sprint WiMax networks in two of those cities, Chicago and Washington, D.C., still aren't open for business. Sprint's WiMax business was going through a complex merger with Clearwire at the time, which was completed in December. But in Verizon's case, the technology arguably is even newer.