FCC Gives Thumbs-Up To First LTE Phone 42
eagledck tips news that the FCC has "finally approved the first 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) phone for sale in the US." The Samsung device will use MetroPCS as a carrier, but tech specs, software details and a launch timetable are still uncertain. Meanwhile, Verizon is ramping up testing of their own LTE infrastructure, hoping to launch in 25 to 30 markets by the end of the year. An anonymous reader notes that LTE rollouts could be hampered by a confused and conflicted patent situation. "It is impossible to know where all the patents are but we have identified more than 60 companies holding essential patents. It is a very large landscape and fragmented. If there was one major patent pool and a handful of individual companies to deal with, that would be possible. But signing license deals with 40 plus [entities] is not. A unified patent pool is best," said a representative for one of three patent pool organizations trying to accomplish that.
Re:Strange, MetroPCS has no 3G network (Score:2, Insightful)
LTE means a new infrastructure. I would expect a lot of carriers that don't have yet a 3G network to just skip 3G and do LTE.
Doesn't matter if plans suck (Score:4, Insightful)
LTE or no LTE doesn't matter as long as the data plans in US are as horrible as they are now. LTE can be useful if the operator somehow enables tethering, secondary data line, or other ways to use the fast data connection. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have to pay close to $50/month to get LTE/3G data connection with restricted data usage via tethering, or $10-30/month if you want to use data just on your mobile phone, or both if you want LTE/3G usb data stick + data on your mobile.
This obscene pricing for data is holding back any real breakthrough in wireless data market in US. When comparing that to current prices in Finland the difference is huge. Currently operators are offering up to 14.4mbit/sec 3.5G (HSPA) data line for 14€/month. The plan includes data for your mobile phone + USB data stick for your computer with secondary SIM without data usage restrictions. Both data connections will work simultaneously and use the same phone number, secondary SIM doesn't receive text messages otherwise it's identical to primary SIM.
The result of such pricing scheme in Finland is that many families have several high speed internet connections at their disposal. Surprisingly telcos are quite profitable and have been able to offset the declining revenue in fixed line business with new wireless services.
Taxpayer money? (Score:1, Insightful)
I wonder how many taxpayer-funded subsidies were given to the telecom companies to develop LTE, just so we can get soaked again on our monthly bill to pay the patent royalties on technology we already paid once to develop.
Infrastructure (Score:1, Insightful)
There's only so much a user would want to do with a phone, even with the extra bandwidth. You can stream a movie perhaps but the inevitable trend towards usage caps all but eliminates that fantasy. What's more interesting here is the infrastructure. More bandwidth means more devices can be supported, such as laptops as TFA mentions. Bona fide ISPs can be built on LTE, so the possible availability of alternate internet services is something to look forward to.