In September of last year a Pennsylvania resident gave us of a fixed residential LTE trial Verizon has secretly been conducting with DirecTV, providing speeds (albeit on a test network) of 27 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream. A few months after that a DirecTV executive accidentally confirmed the trials at an investor conference in New York, saying a residential LTE offering for rural users was several years out. We’d never seen Verizon confirm these trials until last week on the company’s earnings call, when Verizon CFO Fran Shammo responded to a question about LTE. (DSLReports)