The GSMA Mobile World Congress is underway in Barcelona, Spain, and LTE appears to be the talk of the town. T-Mobile International is one of the many providers from around the globe who has decided on LTE as their 4G technology, but unlike Verizon, who would like us to believe that their LTE network will go from non-existent to fully functional in just one year's time, T-Mobile is being a bit more realistic about their 4G plans.
During a press conference in Barcelona, T-Mobile CEO Hamid Akhavan estimated that his company would likely not be able to do any broad-scale LTE deployments until 2011. Said Akhavan, "from a technology perspective, the key components [for LTE] 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." T-Mobile UK's technical director Emin Gurdenli elaborated to Unstrung Magazine, explaining that they also prefer to wait until LTE devices with both data and voice capability will be available to launch their network (data-only LTE devices will hit the market before those with voice capabilities).
T-Mobile won't just be sitting around waiting until 2011, though - they plan to beef up their still new 3G HSPA network over the next couple of years before launching LTE services.
