This is not an article about evolution, but rather LTE, which if you bought the newspapers on a Sunday, would be what the vast majority of the adverts are about. The various cellular providers, and in particular Vodacom, announcing that they have launched LTE and that Vodacom in particular has operational sites around Johannesburg already. MTN apparently plans to launch it by the end of the year and no doubt Cell-C will also.

We are apparently one of the first countries in the world to start with LTE but no doubt we will all have to get new modems, and probably new phones, to use the technology because apart from the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy SIII, no other phones can use it. LTE will essentially allow us to search the Internet without the pages stalling, at speeds at least three times faster than 3G, if not even faster than that. It uses the spectrum currently being used by analog television signals and once South Africa moves to digital TV, there will be more spectrum that will be freed up and all those companies providing LTE capabilities will then be able to offer even more. The only drawback is that apparently the LTE modems are going to cost more than the modems and dongles we’ve all got used to using in our laptops but no doubt those prices will drop soon as well. Anything that improves the overall download speeds in South Africa can only be of benefit, while they are always telling us that we are amongst the first countries to have this, our broadband speeds are ridiculously slow compared to the rest of the world.