Verizon Wireless, KDDI & China Telecom Officially Join the GSMA at MWC 2010

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Don’t look now folks but it looks like CDMA is going to be history soon. You shouldn’t panic and go for a GSM device just yet as CDMA carriers aren’t going anywhere. They are simply moving on to greener pastures. In this case we’re talking about LTE, the 4G standard that is going to be embraced by a lot of wireless operators around the world including Verizon Wireless, KDDI and China Telecom. These three are all CDMA carriers that have announced at the MWC 2010 their intention of joining the GSMA.

According to the GSMA press release all three wireless services providers will start commercial deployment of LTE this year and they expect to deliver high-speed services (LTE included) to more than 150 million customers in the following three years. The number is definitely impressive but that doesn’t tell us an awful lot about future LTE plans in those specific markets, does it?

Including Verizon Wireless, KDDI and China Telecom, more than 74 mobile operators around the world will offer 4G connectivity via LTE. The new mobile communication standard will be interoperable with GPRS, WCDMA and HSPA which means that we’ll be able to use our future LTE devices no matter what countries we’re going to go to for business or pleasure.

LTE is basically going to offer us theoretical download and upload speeds of up to 100Mbps and 50Mbps, respectively. While these peaks won’t actually be reached in real life, LTE will still bring us a major increase in downlink and uplink speeds and we can’t but wish for it to arrive sooner.

We haven’t seen any LTE-ready handsets at MWC 2010 and maybe it’s too early to want such devices. We’ll be waiting for major carriers to test LTE by the end of the year and maybe the following edition of MWC is going to be more LTE-oriented.