In what may be a pre-emptive announcement before next week’s GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, San Diego’s Novatel Wireless (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NVTL]]) says it has successfully made a data transmission call using Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G technology.
LTE is one of several next-generation wireless technology standards that promise increased capacity as cell phone users increasingly download data, photos, and video from the Internet. Novatel says LTE can provide data rates as high as 50 megabits per second on the uplink and 100 megabits per second on the downlink and “an enhanced user experience by leveraging new, wider bandwidth spectrum.”
But as Phone Scoop blogger Eric M. Zeman notes, “Novatel didn’t state what speeds it attained, nor whether or not the equipment used was standards compliant.”
Novatel says that many wireless system operators are planning to overlay fourth-generation LTE systems on their existing 3G networks to augment data capacity in important areas. The company also says it is working with operators, which it did not identify, and plans to launch commercial data services later this year. In the statement issued by Novatel, CTO Slim Souissi says, “We believe our aggressive development efforts will enable us to deliver these innovative solutions with the fastest possible time to market.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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