LTE isn t as united as you might think

Rating: Just when you thought there was one world standard

Chatting to executives from ZTE in Shanghai yesterday, GoMo News was astonished to discover that LTE [Long Term Evolution] isn t just a single technology. There s two flavours of it TD-LTE and FD-LTE. So bang goes one 4G handset that will work anywhere.

This crucial piece of information slipped out when ZTE was describing the work it is going to do for the World Expo due to take place in Shanghai next year [2010].

Using LTE technology, network operators aims to reach a (theoretical) peak data transfer rates of 340 Mbit/s. Naturally, no-one can get anywhere near that speed at present.

However, in a commercial LTE trial in Hong Kong with CSL, ZTE was able to give a demonstration of the LTE network with peak download speeds in excess of 100 Mbit/s.

Even better news is that ZTE has won a contract from China Mobile to provide LTE coverage across the city of Shanghai for 2010.

This will come as a bit of a shock for Shanghai s residents. GoMo News was in the city and using 3G dongles from both Vodafone (Option) and 3 UK (Huawei). The best connection was at EDGE speeds (about 115 Kbit/s) while most connections were at GPRS speeds of about 43 Kbit/s.

So, in theory, Shanghai residents could find they can achieve data throughput speeds one thousand times higher than they enjoy at present. Pretty impressive, huh?

But worse was to come. A ZTE spokesperson explained that the Expo network is going to be built with TD-LTE technology while there s another version known as FD-LTE.

If you want to upgrade from a W-CDMA style 3G network, then like China Mobile you re going to use TD-LTE. However, if you re running one of the other two 3G technologies - TD-SCDMA (as China does) or a CDMA2000 network (as America does) then you re going to need FD-LTE.

There s some good news for those on CDMA 2000 networks because ZTE s already proved that you can build one handset that works on voice for CDMA 2000 and achieves 52 Mbit/s download speeds via LTE.

All of this high speed data is great for mobile applications but somewhat of a disappointment for the poor consumer who had visions that one 4G cellular device might work anywhere.

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