Companies such as Huawei, ZTE and Alcatel Lucent aggressively promoted their wares at the Mobile Congress Asia trade show in Hong Kong last week. They showed speeds some 50 times faster than existing 3G networks.
In China, the world’s biggest mobile market with more than 700 million users, only China Mobile has shown interest in looking at the fourth-generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, with smaller rivals China Telecom and China Unicom not saying very much at the moment.
According to research firm Informa, even in developed markets such as Britain, the cost of upgrading the current network to 4G will not be economically viable until 2015 at the earliest.
The Times of India reports the lack of smartphones and supporting software will further impede the growth of LTE, just as the use of existing 3G networks only really took off following Apple’s launch of its iPhone.