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The LTE standard has not even been finalized yet, but operators keep announcing aggressive roll-out timelines anyway, keeping up momentum behind the technology - and pressure on the vendors to deliver. But early adopters still run the risk of having to use pre-standard technology, and going live with limited choice of devices.

China Mobile has made many statements about deploying LTE alongside 3G from next year, and earlier this week Verizon Wireless - which is conducting joint trials with the Chinese cellco and Vodafone - said it expected to have at least a few commercial markets live by the end of 2009. With the US operators uncharacteristically leading the world in adopting next generation mobile platforms, there is even speculation that Sprint Nextel, despite its 51% stake in the WiMAX-based Clear venture, could adopt a dual 4G strategy, migrating its CDMA networks to LTE.

The prospect of beleaguered Sprint shouldering both half the costs of the ambitious Clear build-out, and its own LTE deployment, will make shareholders shudder, not to mention the complexities of marketing and branding two competitive services. In the short term, Sprint plans to offer mobile broadband capabilities to its existing user base via dual-mode CDMA/WiMAX devices, branded as Sprint 4G and roaming on to the Clear system where available. But it may fear that, in the medium term, these dual-mode terminals will not achieve the volume economics, or the choice of innovative devices, that are hoped for in LTE, once that gains critical mass.

A research note from FBR Capital Markets said: "In our view, although WiMAX offers a significant wireless data leadership position for the company in the near term, we do not expect the new Clearwire to fully substitute a mobile 4G product for Sprint. A converged voice and data 4G solution (such as LTE) is preferable to what essentially will be a fusion of two different networks (CDMA and iterations for voice, WiMAX for data)."

Sprint is currently rebanding its 800MHz iDEN spectrum and so should gain 10MHz of additional spectrum in the 1.9GHz band as well as contiguous spectrum in the 800MHz band, either or both of which could be used for LTE.

Despite the aggressive talk of the leading operators, though, LTE will have to wait several years before it achieves that mass - AT&T, for instance, says it can eke out broadband performance from upgrading its HSPA network for some years to come, and is unlikely to deploy LTE on any wide scale until 2013. Verizon Wireless CTO Dick Lynch is more bullish, telling the Cisco C-Scape conference this week that "we expect that LTE will actually be in service somewhere here in the US probably this time next year". But with the deadline for ratification of the standard extended until March 2009, it would almost certainly have to use pre-standard kit, which carries high costs and the risks of needing to invest in updates a year or so later (an approach Japan's DoCoMo is also mulling, as it did in 3G).

Although the LTE specifications are 'frozen', there is still tweaking to be done, not to mention the complex and lengthy business of setting up interoperability testing and certification processes once the standard is complete, and building a device and software ecosystem around it. LG demonstrated its first LTE terminal, delivering downlink rates of 60Mbps, this week, but said it did not expect to ship commercial devices until at least 2010.

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