And to light a fire under consumers, Verizon is offering two grab-'em-while-you-can incentives: Unlimited data for $30, and free mobile hot-spot capability for up to eight tethered devices.
The latter perk has an expiration date of May 15, after which hot spots will cost $20 for every two gigabytes of data. The unlimited 4G data plan is good for two years, but will soon be phased out for new users, probably toward the summer.
"We announced earlier that we will eventually move to usage-based pricing this year, but we do not have a specific date," Verizon spokesperson Albert Aydin told us Tuesday.
Leading the Pack
Verizon's Nationwide Talk plan for the Thunderbolt begins at $39.99 per month.
The Thunderbolt is the first of four phones unveiled at January's Consumer Electronics Show that will open Verizon's LTE network, now available in 38 markets and 60 airports, for widespread consumer use after its rollout in December for computer modems only.
The other phones are Motorola's Droid Bionic, LG's Revolution, and Samsung's SCH-i510. All four devices are powered by Google's Android operating system.
But Thunderbolt -- with a 4.3-inch touchscreen, one-gigahertz Snapdragon processor, a kickstand for media viewing, and dual cameras -- seems to be the flagship LTE device. It has appeared in Verizon LTE commercials, and Taiwan-based HTC placed ads on its web site before CES promising that its device would be "First to 4G, Again." HTC also makes the similarly designed EVO, which was the first device on Sprint Nextel's high-speed WiMAX network, and the G2, which runs on T-Mobile's high-speed HSPA+ network.
The $249.99 price is higher than the $199 average for smartphones subsidized by carriers with contracts, indicating that Verizon, often found to have the highest customer-satisfaction rating, will charge a premium for LTE products.
Premium Price
"New phone launches, especially exclusive deals, always have premium pricing," said analyst Kirk Parsons of J.D. Power and Associates. "And since the new device is on the 4G-lite network, data plans and service costs will be more expensive based on available broadband speed 
Verizon is promising download speeds of five to 12 megabits per second and upload speeds of two to five Mbps in the LTE Mobile Broadband coverage area, and since a large portion of the United States is not covered by LTE, the Thunderbolt and other phones will roam to 3G coverage when necessary. Verizon hopes to complete its LTE rollout by 2014.
While all four major U.S. carriers now offer what they call 4G high-speed devices, none meet the International Telecommunication Union's definition of 4G, which is one gigabyte per second for stationary users, so the term 4G Lite is often used to describe U.S. networks.
"Under global standards, the '4G' technology that the U.S. carriers are rolling out are not true 4G networks in the sense of data speeds," Parsons said.
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