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.