mocoNews - Mobile Bits: MetroPCS, Nokia/LTE Detail Plans; New Forum For Voice Over LTE; Strong Growth For WiMax

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James Quintana Pearce

mocoNews.net
Thursday, March 5, 2009; 9:00 PM

It seems that 4G technology LTE is gaining ground on rival WiMax. MetroPCS COO Tom Keys said that the company is skipping EVDO deployment and moving straight to LTE: "Our hope is to deploy in the latter part of 2010, but that's not nailed down" he told GigaOM. MetroPCS plans to launch a smartphone from "a Canadian vendor" in the second or third quarter, and Keys said the telco has heavy SMS and MMS usage, along with strong usage of social services like Facebook Mobile, MySpace mobile and Loopt.

Meanwhile, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has committed to LTE with James Harper, senior manager of technology marketing at Nokia, saying, "WiMAX has some place in the market, but we do believe it's a niche play". Harsh. GigaOM has a slide of Nokia's view of LTE trends in the industry, which is basically heading up. There's also a strong suggestion there that Nokia will be making laptops for the technology.

?LTE Voice Services: A forum has been formed to promote a proprietary solution to delivering traditional circuit-switched voice services over the packet-based LTE network, and to propose the standards to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards body according to Unstrung. It writes that the forum will be officially launched on the 9th of March, and includes T-Mobile, Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Samsung, Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Kineto, LG Electronics (SEO: 066570), Nortel, Starent Networks and ZTE Corp.

?WiMax Still In The Running: Nevertheless, WiMax still has its adherents who say that it will outcompete LTE?at least in the short term. 4G Wireless Evolution has a piece quoting a few predictions from some analysts. ABI Research predicts that WiMax subscription revenues will increase 4,500 percent this year, which I suspect has a lot to do with the extremely low base that it's growing off. Meanwhile, In-Stat predicted that by 2013 LTE will have 23 million subscribers, while there will be 82 million WiMax-equipped PCs.

Motorola Starts LTE Demo In UK