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Verizon Wireless kept its promise to announce its first LTE suppliers, going with the hardly surprising duo of Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson. CTO Dick Lynch was sticking to another promise, to have a market live this year, though prior to Mobile World Congress he had indicated that the first build-out would be geared mainly to fixed access and filling gaps in wireline parent Verizon Communications' network, rather than wide area mobile broadband from day one.

Along with China Mobile, though, Verizon remains the most aggressive about early LTE adoption - with their mutual partner, Vodafone, far more cautious on timescales for its own territories (2011-2012), but likely to reap the benefits of watching its allies' efforts, learning from their mistakes and taking part in joint trials and RFPs. The three firms used MWC to impress on the world once again their combined buying power and influence over standards, and to talk about the increasing closeness of the FDD and TDD implementations of LTE, which could lead to full harmonization in the near future (China Mobile, of course, is committed to TDD).

Elsewhere though, MWC has not turned into quite the LTE roadshow that had been expected, largely because carriers are getting cautious about even suggesting near term investment in another technology and in large, high risk networks. Vodafone, Orange and other European giants said earlier in the week that they would wait some years for large scale deployment, and today T-Mobile, previously the most gung-ho of the European majors, also put 2011 as the likely date for serious roll-out. This was a reversal of its previous public statements that it would move swiftly to LTE because it did not see HSPA+ as being a great deal more cost effective, as it requires a hardware upgrade to support MIMO antenna arrays, the way to achieve its maximum data rates.

CEO Hamid Akhavan told a press conference: "From a technology perspective, the key components will be mainly in place in the latter half of 2010, but other obstacles such as spectrum could put the whole launch date in question." Instead, the cellco will introduce 14.4Mbps HSDPA this year, and will test 21Mbps and 28Mbps (MIMO) HSPA+ during 2009. The company also expects to start LTE trials before year end.

AT&T, by contrast, has become marginally less cautious, saying it wants to have commercial LTE in key markets by mid-2011, whereas it had previously been looking at a year later than that. But like many carriers, it believes it can eke a great deal more performance out of upgrading its HSPA network, a point of view that has made HSPA+, rather than LTE, probably the star turn, in infrastructure and silicon terms at least, at this year's Congress.

Ericsson's CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg, whose firm should benefit either way, said in an analyst conference that he expected HSPA to be the major technology for the next five years in terms of volume deployments, and that LTE will have only 10% of the 3bn mobile broadband lines Ericsson expects to be in play by 2014. His forecast shows 80% of all broadband lines at that date being wireless.

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