Mobile broadband to beat FTTH to 100Mbps?

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Are they serious? Surely not. At the BSG conference back in June the view seemed to be that 4G mobile technology (lamely labelled LTE, or Long Term Evolution - yeuch! See the Wikipedia reference to learn about what it really means, and to revel in further acronymic jargon-hell) would reach maybe 50Mbps, but not much more. But this report at telecompetitor.com suggests that the powers that be in the mobile world are touting 100Mbps. Not just this, but they are saying they will deliver this sort of performance before FTTH networks can do so on a "commercial basis" (whatever that might mean).

Of course all this needs to be taken with the usual shovelful of salt. As most users of mobile broadband in the UK will probably tell you currently, real performance falls far short of the quoted bandwidth. Having said this, they report that they have achieved 186Mbps in the lab already. So maybe a real world figure of 50 megabits might actually be more realistic.

Could prove interesting as the posturing over headline performance figures begins to heat up. More interestingly, the ability to get this sort of performance out of wireless technologies bodes well for rural/remote next-gen networks, which can become increasingly cost effective when a mix of FTTH and wireless is used in order to reach the most outlying properties.