4G Coming in New Year

Verizon CTO heard saying LTE technology to be up and running by "this time next year"

The just demoed LTE technology seems to be hot and happening with folks at Verizon who are sounding upbeat about implementing it very soon.

Verizon's chief technology officer Dick Lynch was overheard saying that he expects LTE technology to be up and running by "this time next year". The comment came during an informal meet with reporters covering Cisco's C-scape conference held earlier this week, according to Ars Technica.

Mass deployment of LTE networks was not a priority until now for most wireless carriers owing to the fact that consumers were still unhappy with the existing 3G coverage. A jump to an entirely new platform, especially after investing lot of dough building up the existing 3G infrastructure might have not made sense. However, that sentiment seems to be weakening by the day.

While carriers themselves had predicted an expected 2010 to 2012 deployment of LTE, the pace seems to have gotten much faster. Additionally, with constant improvements with LTE chips it is possible that you will see LTE networks seeing the light of the day sooner than you expected.

As for India, we do have some happy news in the form of the 3G launch which finally happened at Delhi with MTNL offering users an initial look at the service. For the uninitiated, LTE is unofficially termed a 4G technology!