4G LTE Mobile Broadband Services Growing In Popularity

Market research company ABI Research reports that mobile operators around the world have really started turning their attention to the next generation of super-fast 4G mobile broadband – also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE).

According to the reports by the company, so far 132 mobile networks have either begun trials or are about to launch LTE service commercially, which is 32 more than at the end of last year.

LTE mobile broadband will have the ability to offer download speeds of 100Mbps to 1000Mbps (1Gbps), although due to the bandwidth allocation across so many mobile users, and given existing core capacity limits, real-world speeds of 8-36Mbps are a more realistic figure.

Mobile operators Verizon (USA), and DoCoMo (Japan) will both begin their wide-scale roll-outs of 4G services by the end of 2010, whilst O2 in the UK are aiming for a 2010/2011 timeframe.