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In December 2009, Swedish mobile operator TeliaSonera launched the world’s first commercial LTE network. We covered one of the first speed tests, 37 ms ping time, 42.78 Mbps (5.3375 megabytes per second) download and 5.3 Mbps (0.6625 megabytes per second) upload, but less than a month later there was a blog post published that said after purchasing an LTE modem and doing some quick testing, speeds above 12 Mbps were never achieved.
Lots of people blogged about that 12 Mbps story, I didn’t because I figured the network was too young and painting it in a bad light this early would make people upset for no reason. That and I don’t want to provide ammunition for the “WiMAX is better” party of psychopaths who troll this blog.
It looks like it was a good thing I held off, because that very same blog that once said they never hit 12 Mbps, are now claiming that they rarely experience anything under 25 Mbps and have hit peaks of 45 Mbps.
Far better, but still too early to tell how awesome LTE will be once networks are mature. Once you get 25 Mbps in your phone, the bottleneck is going to be your device’s processor, and battery life, but that’s still quite a ways away.
About The Author
Stefan Constantinescu
Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.
