MetroPCS, one of America’s smaller operators, and one who until now has been using CDMA technology, has launched LTE in the Dallas Forth Worth Texas area. It becomes the second market in the United States to get the next generation of mobile broadband, the first being Las Vegas. Now while LTE sounds cool, and trust us when we say the things it offers like 100 Mbps download speeds and pings in the low 30 millisecond range are a truly awesome technological achievement, MetroPCS is using their 4G to do silly things like stream video. The only device they offer with LTE capabilities is a feature phone made by Samsung that uses an anemic processor. Earlier this year Nokia released a sub 150 EUR feature phone that had 802.11n and people made it out to be like the extra speed is going to be put to good use. Truth of the matter is that no matter how many bits per second your device is capable of receiving or transmitting, if it can’t process them into something useful like say rendering a webpage, then there’s no point for the speed. Sadly, isn’t even a USB LTE dongle for sale.
Don’t fret. Verizon is going to launch LTE by the end of the year and they’re going to cover more than 2 cities. They plan on reaching about 80 million people in 30 markets and while initially they’ll have only USB LTE dongles, they’ll be smartphones coming shortly, and tablets too.
Sweden and Norway are the only two countries where real commercial LTE is deployed and in full use. Those guys are enjoying download speeds that average 30 Mbps, or 3 times what I get at home, and upload speeds that are about half that. Europe will most likely jump on board the LTE bandwagon in full force once it’s 2013 and the whole continent is using the 800 MHz band as their chosen standard.