Real world tests at 400-500 megabits. Sebastian Anthony at Extremetech tested the Linksys 1900/Quantenna getting 449 Mbps, as you can see in the picture at right. Reviewers at Amazon tested at similar speeds. Swisscom and several cable guys are very happy with the Quantenna chips; anecdotally, 9 times out of 10 Quantenna-based gateways connect the whole house at TV speeds. The full rated speed of 1.3 gigabits is actually possible if you have two of these units connected with 4 antennas each and the right environment. Update 2/23 John Cioffi reminds me that .ac achieves the highest speeds by using 160 MHz. In any crowded environment, that won't be possible.

Vint Cerf, Megan Smith, Marty CooperWith congestion already a problem, do we want more traffic from telcos? Is it smart to give up 25%-75% of the bandwdith for telco LTE? "LAA" is seeing a huge push in 3GPP and elsewhere. Giant telcos want to make this happen incredibly fast although no one has done field trials to prove the sharing can work. They want to create "facts on the ground" before the regulator, much less the public, even know what's going on.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray says they will deploy in 2015, Verizon's Tony Melone is not far behind and AT&T is working in standards. SK in Korea and all the equipment guys are jumping on. More than half of traffic now goes on WiFi but the telcos can't charge for it in most countries. So they are moving the free WiFi calls to LTE "Assisted Access" so they can charge. If they clobber WiFi in the process, better for them. If all the current uncharged WiFi traffic moved to LTE, most phone bills would double or triple. 

Kevin Smithen and Will Clayton of Macquarie broke the story, which was picked by by Fierce, Jan Brodkin and Kevin Fitchard. Telcos grabbing a big hunk of WiFi is about as important a mobile story as I can imagine, but I couldn't find even a single report in a major newspaper. WSJ, NYT, WP and the Guardian haven't even mentioned LAA.   

ETSI five-miles-to-the-seaBoth the U.S. and the UK have active regulatory proceedings on how to use millimeter waves for commerce, especially broadband wireless. Ted Rappaport of NYU has convincing data the technology can work and Korea, Japan & Russia are hoping to deploy in three years. Huawei is committed to spending $600M on 5G research and Europe has a $B available. It will be very big in the discussions at MWC in Barcelona and the ITU WRC this fall. Now is the time to define how this will be done.

ETSI, the European standards group in Sophia Antipolis, is jumping in with what they call an "Industry Specification Group." An ISG takes less effort to set up than a formal standards group, can be set up quickly and costs less than setting up an industry trade group like BBWF or the new IOT groups. As far as I can tell from the website, membership is open. Renato Lombardi of Huawei is chair and Nader Zei of NEC Europe vice-chair.

Joining standards groups often is an exceptional way to keep up with the latest research.  

Below, ETSI on ISG, first members of group and the official announcement.

Korea Telecom/Rwanda Government ORN spectrum could support ~2 gigabits across the country. While the initial rollout is using only 20 MHz, the Nokia equipment being installed can expand quickly to 60 MHz/400 megabits. There's a clear roadmap at least to 100 MHz with higher MIMO, enough to go well above a gigabit.  Nokia demonstrated 3.8 gigabits at the recent Mobile Asia event, using 200 MHz. http://bit.ly/38gigabits

   Joint venture ORN has 145 MHz of prime low band spectrum between 700 MHz and 900 MHz. This is one of the world's first wide allocations of spectrum, the most efficient way to increase capacity in the LTE and 5G era. Large spectrum blocks are the right move for capacity in any country with few wires, including India, Indonesia, and almost all of sub-Saharan Africa. 

Steve Perlman's pCell claims require a reality distortion field. Update: 2 professors confirm below.  Second Update. Met with Perlman and engineers. He has real engineers who did a slick trick using iPhones as LTE receivers. They may also have some neat tricks in MU MIMO and SON. Not close to their claims and most not new. Update 3: They don't give details about the software inside their server. It could be seriously interesting as improvements on how cells work together. Or it could be not.  More to come.  Original: Nick Wingfield in the Times believed a demo that could be reproduced on a cheap home WiFi router demonstrates a wireless breakthrough nyti.ms/1cZx3rS.  The Times showed 8 iPhones simultaneously playing HD video. Reporter Nick Wingfield wrote, "that would ordinarily bring a cellular network to its knees." Netflix streams at 5.5 mbps or less, so 8 streams is less than the 50 megabits even a modest cell site delivers, with 100-150 megabits becoming the standard rapidly. Within the space of a loft, speeds would be much higher. A 300 megabit router at Fry's this week costs $44.95 http://http://bit.ly/1ghadhU; Fry's is selling a gigabit router for $129.95 http://bit.ly/O9rWQM. Ericsson has demo'd 800 megabit LTE in a van driving around Stockholm. 48 megabits or even 400 megabits in a small space is not an advance.