LAS VEGAS — Though you may hear some breathless reports about the splashy Long Term Evolution demonstrations from Verizon and its partners here at CES this week, don’t be fooled into thinking that any of this stuff is going to surface anytime soon. While we certainly believe Verizon intends to launch commercial services sometime in 2010, end-users will have to be satisfied with big desktop modems or chunky USB dongles at best — leaving the LTE cameras, cars, homes and other whizzy devices for delivery at some undetermined future date.
If you take WiMAX as an example — and since it is largely comparble to LTE from a pure radio standpoint it seems fair — two years ago at CES WiMAX proponents Intel and Motorola were staging live driving tests of the technology, a real-world element still missing from any of the LTE demonstrations we saw here Thursday morning. Since live WiMAX service only emerged this past year, you can do the math on the expected time frame from live CES demos to commercial services and products.
The Ericsson LTE suite here — an impressive setup of an imaginary medical team that used LTE-enabled devices to make health care an on-demand application — actually used wires to connect most of its “LTE” devices… just to show you what was possible. Same with the Alcatel-Lucent setup, where I got my picture taken… with a Wi-Fi camera. “See, this is how fast it would be if it were using LTE,” the demo rep said. Not particularly impressive.
And the one demonstration in the Alcalu suite that was really using over-the-air LTE? The modem from the laptop (used for a multi-player game app) was tucked in a drawer. “I’m not allowed to open the drawer,” the demo rep said. But the two big antennas on top of the monitor were a giveaway: Most of LTE gear is a long way from prime time availability.
I’ve got some pictures here of a “not production” LTE desktop modem from LG, as well as a plastic shell that will apparently be the size of the LG LTE dongle, both expected out… sometime later this year. The coolest of all the demos was a handheld LTE-enabled camera from Samsung, which showed streaming video to an LTE-enabled picture frame. But given the faux state of the other demos, we’re not quite sure it was really running on LTE; and given the non-committal answer about when such products might ship — “next year, maybe?” — we’re not hopeful we’ll be able to stream our photos via LTE to distant family members anytime soon.
With all the activity and marketing bucks being spent — the side-by-side suites took up a whole wing of meeting rooms here at the Venetian — it’s clear the momentum behind LTE is indisputible. The delivery dates for LTE products and services? That’s still indecipherable.
(bad photos below. Want good ones? Go see Engadget.)
This is the big (about the size of a netbook) LG prototype LTE modem.
This is the plastic shell that will be the size of the LG USB dongle modem… so they say. I creatively put a pen next to it to show the size scale.