It’s not often you hear about two major mobile phone manufacturer’s playing nicely and working together, but mention the words ‘4G’ to Nokia and Sony Ericsson and they happily link up together arm and arm under the view that there’s safety in numbers when it comes to thrashing the likes of Intel.
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NED and Alcatel-Lucent have recently joined forces to build a licensing framework for new 4G patents, and the new solid team could mean that they are in a stronger position to compete against Intel’s Wimax plans.
The four mobile phone companies are claiming that the new licensing framework – dubbed Long Term Evolution, or LTE for short is the future for mobile phones and will eventually also replace Wi-Fi.
When the 4G system goes ahead the providers should be able to provide voice, data and streamed multimedia on an “anytime, anywhere” basis.
Of course, Nokia seem to have had their focus on developing the next generation of mobile phones now, they’ve even carried out extensive tests in an urban environment earlier on in the year. The results seemed pretty spectacular – trialling on a 2.6GHz spectrum they managed to achieve a maximum download speed of 173Mbps.
Even though it looks like plans for the next-gen of mobile phone seems to be going well, it’s not worth getting too excited about yet. Even if the LTE group can demonstrate that new technology can run on existing base stations, estimates are that we won’t see it being commercially released until around 2010.
