WCDMA and HSDPA are still not available in many places around the world. Then why all the rush with LTE?
At Mobile World Congress (MWC), February 2008 in Barcelona, LTE was everywhere. Ericsson and Nortel had demos and many operators have already stated their commitment to the technology. T-Mobile International was showing off a demo of LTE at CeBIT, March 2008 in Hannover with Ericsson equipments. Also world's first 3G operator, NTTDoCoMo says it will offer LTE services with Nokia equipments in 2010.
LTE specifications have been approved and going to be included in release 8 of 3GPP standard which could be ready end of this year or beginning of 2009. The first commercial products are estimated to be available end of 2009 or beginning of 2010.
2009/2010 LTE is baseline which means that it can provide 100 Mbps DL speed. A second trial conducted by LSTI (LTE/SAE Trial Initiative) recently shows that even 300 Mbps can be reached by LTE in DL. This was achieved by 4x4 MIMO and single user in a cell. Even though being the only user in a cell almost never happens in a real network, the test at least shows it is possible to reach 300 Mbps.
I believe the main reasons for the rush are a) The competition between the vendors and between the operators. Today's telecom technology is improving fast and one of the major elements to survive as a vendor or operator is to be future proven b) Technology is fun and exciting to most of technology lovers. Talking in advance about what can be achieved in future and how far a new technology can push the limits is fun and creates the excitement. So the excitement and fun is the other driving factor for all the rush by people involved.
