AT&T's Motorola Atrix 4G locks horns with Verizon's HTC Thunderbolt 4G
Soon to be joined by the Droid Charge, the Thunderbolt is the first phone to run on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Reuters

Verizon has acknowledged that its 4G LTE network is facing periodic outages, which started Tuesday night. We're aware of an issue with 4G LTE connections & our network engineers are working to resolve quickly, the company said on Twitter.

In an update on Twitter, the company said again that it was investigating the issue, acknowledging that Thunderbolts making voice calls may get 1XRTT data, meaning that the phone gets a voice connection only. Thunderbolt phones can work on the 3G network, but that doesn't offer the speed of data transmission that LTE does.

So far, the only phone that supports Verizon's 4G LTE network is the HTC Thunderbolt. That will be joined tomorrow by Samsung's Droid Charge. News of the outage is unlikely to bode well for the Charge's release.

Ironically, as pointed out by Mobilized, the outage comes shortly after Verizon Vice President Nicola Palmer said that she expected more issues from the company's 4G LTE since its December rollout. The surprise here to me is the speed bumps were very few and far between and they didn't do any damage to the undercarriage, she said on Monday.

There is no word on what caused the outages, or when service will be restored.

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