250 Mbps - now that's what I call 3G

Just last week I spent a morning at Bristol’s Wireless 2.0 technology show. There I spent the day in the company of experts from femtocell companies (picoChip / femtocell foundation), network planning companies (ProVision) and other technology firms too numerous to mention.

One of the forthcoming technologies mentioned there was LTE. The pointlessly named ‘long term evolution’. Is it just me or does that mean absolutely nothing?

NTT DoCoMo has realised this too and has just announced its roadmap calling it Super 3G instead. Much better. Instantly descriptive.

The Japanese carrier also thinks it could be ready as soon as next year and has just held a full scale demo in Tokyo.

I won’t go into the technology behind it. If nothing else my eyes started to glaze over when I was told. But, it does look like it could exceed the expectations quoted at Wireless 2.0. Instead of 100Mbps, 250Mbps seems likely.

I could possibly ask what legal activity actually needs those speeds but I’ll leave it with being impressed.

Tech Radar summed it up nicely with the following:

DoCoMo says it will start building its Super 3G network in late 2009, meaning – thanks to the fact that it only needs to upgrade the software powering its existing 3G service – that 2010 likely marks the start of the LTE era.