Today Verizon's 4G LTE network turned three years old, and the big red carrier decided that a good way to celebrate would be to give the service a nice injection of Advanced Wireless Spectrum airwaves. Verizon today revealed to GigaOM that it has improved its LTE network in several markets across the country, using the AWS spectrum that it acquired from a consortium of cable companies in 2012 to boost the peak speeds and capacity of its network.

Verizon Chief Network Officer Nicola Palmer says that her company has improved its LTE network in many of the major cities located east of the Mississippi River, including New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston, as well as cities in the western part of the country, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In areas where the network has been upgraded, Verizon customers with AWS LTE-compatible hardware should begin seeing faster network speeds, even as more and more people connect to the network.

So which devices can latch onto this improved LTE network? Verizon says that it's already got a handful of products that support the service, like the iPhone 5s and 5c, Galaxy S 4 and the Droid Mini, Ultra and Maxx. The carrier is also planning to update other Android devices, like the Galaxy Note 3, to support its AWS network. It's expected that almost every Verizon smartphone released from this point on will support its upgraded network.

Verizon has quietly been upgrading its LTE network with AWS spectrum for a while now, and by the end of the year it expects to have 5,000 AWS cell sites up and running, while another 5,000 sites will be in the process of receiving an AWS boost. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo recently admitted that his carrier's LTE network had begun to experience a bit of congestion, which isn't entirely surprising considering how long long it's been live, and so it's good to see the big red carrier working to increase the capacity and speed of the network. Are you a Verizon customer in a major market like New York, Boston or Washington D.C.? If so, have you noticed any improvements with your LTE service lately?

Via GigaOM