The very name Long Term Evolution (LTE) makes it sound like years before the service will be ready to offer us much faster mobile Internet speeds. Verizon Wireless has announced that it hopes to offer its LTE wireless broadband by December of 2009. The key words here are "Hopes to."

Verizon CTO Dick Lynch said, "We expect that LTE will actually be in service somewhere here in the U.S. probably this time next year." Most other wireless providers looking to roll out LTE are talking 2010 for their service. That said if Verizon missies their self-imposed deadline by mere weeks they are into 2010 as well.

I am looking forward to LTE, though if wireless providers continue down the asinine path of offering insulting monthly bandwidth caps like the laughable 5MB a month some plans offer, LTE will be worthless to the majority of users. I hardly think anyone will be interested in paying a dollar per MB over the 5MB cap after downloading a single Microsoft Windows Update blows out their allowed monthly usage.

Via Yahoo Tech