Rogers, one of Canada’s “Big Three” carriers, today announced that their network would expand to LTE in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Montreal before the end of 2011, and expand to the rest of the country throughout another 21 markets in 2012. Rogers began technical trials back in October, and though Bell and Telus are going in the same direction, they’ve already put a lot of effort into HSPA+. Speeds are expected to peak at around 150 Mbps down, 70 Mbps up. What’s interesting here is that much like AT&T’s plans for their acquisition of T-Mobile, Rogers will be using AWS spectrum for LTE. Currently, the little guys like Wind Mobile and Mobilicity use that spectrum for 3G.
I’m curious how quickly the smaller regional players will be able to keep pace with these kinds of expensive networks, or if they’ll pull a T-Mobile and try to pass off HSPA+ as 4G. The big problem with that is hardware support – over the next year, I think we’ll be seeing a lot more phones supporting LTE than high-speed HSPA+.
Head over to IWantMyLTE.ca for updates on Rogers’ progress, and sign up for a draw to win a trip to Toronto for an Indycar event.