TeliaSonera was the first operator in the world to launch an LTE network, albeit with coverage limited to the cities of Stockholm and Oslo. They did it to offer their customers more speed, lower latency, and because it makes them look good, from a marketing perspective, to be “the first”. Hutchison Whampoa, better known as 3, is going to wait a little bit longer before deploying LTE and are instead going to upgrade their HSPA gear, which was already performing at 21 Mbps, to the new 84 Mbps standard. They’re also launching HSPA on the 900 MHz band, a first in Sweden, to enable better coverage. Speaking of coverage, all of Denmark will get the new 84 Mbps download speed, while only 4 cities in Sweden get the upgrade.
How long until devices are made to support the new standard is a questionable. USB modems will undoubtedly be the first to support such a high download rate, but it may be a while until you’ll be able to load up websites on your mobile phone at a theoretical 10.5 megabytes per second. Hopefully by then Flash videos will be playable across multiple mobile operating systems and you’ll be able to watch whatever video you want, even 2 girls 1 cup, any time, and place.
[Via: Press Release]