Rogers has announced that they will be launching LTE (Long Term Evolution) in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa in 2011 with the top 25 markets across the country coming online in 2012. Rogers claims the LTE network will be capable of download speeds of 150 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 70 Mbps. These numbers will of course fluctuate based on your mobile device. LTE will enable the following:
Everyone will be able to watch streaming movies and live HDTV on their mobile devices, with crisp picture and virtually no buffering or delays
Friends and families can video chat seamlessly – as natural as talking on the phone, with virtually no lag time
Gamers can play their favourite multiplayer games from almost anywhere
Businesses can implement a truly mobile workforce that is both as efficient and secure as a traditional workplace
It’s a bit of a slow week on BlackBerryCool due to the Canada Day and Independence Day long weekends but we have some cool apps and news nonetheless. From a news perspective, RIM soft announced a new feature to deal with corporate liable and employee liable devices. The soft announcement was incredibly vague and is likely hinting towards some BES feature that they weren’t ready to fully announce, but wanted to give everyone a heads up that they are on the case. Some other random rumors have hit the wire as well, including some specs about the upcoming LTE BlackBerry Storm3 and Facebook for BlackBerry 2.0 including Facebook Chat.
At the Canadian Telecom Summit yesterday the major Canadian carriers said they’re on board for LTE and are making preparations for a full-scale rollout of the technology.
This is great news considering BlackBerry devices are upgrading at a rate which will be hindered if the carriers don’t keep up and update the network infrastructure. At the conference, Mike Lazaridis said “Consumption is going to continue to grow. This, in my opinion, is one of the most important problems facing the industry in the near future.”
Carriers, such as Verizon and Rogers, have significantly invested in LTE technology and we’ll hopefully be seeing it sometime in the year 2011.
With the launch of the first LTE networks, you can rest assured that RIM will have an LTE BlackBerry ready to use the 4G equivalent speeds and technology. Now the question is: what would an LTE BlackBerry device look like? Continue reading about what we can expect from an LTE BlackBerry device
