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Bengt Nordstrom and friends drove around Stockholm and blogged LTE downloads "above 25 Mbps more often than below, and we’ve reached 45 Mpbs downlink on some occasions." Service frequently dropped, confirming the rumors I've been hearing of profound issues still unsolved.

   He first blogged he was only getting 12 meg down, which made news around the world because TeliaSonera is claiming they were offering "up to 50 meg." Nordstrom is a wireless analyst with decades of experience. He's clear this wasn't scientific testing, but it's interesting and better than many expected.

     Wireless is shared, meaning the speed will go down as the network gets loaded. So I'm still comfortable with Verizon CTO Dick Lynch's estimate of speeds from 5-12 megabits in regular use. Until proven otherwise, I speak of LTE speeds as "megabits", not tens of megabits. In addition, the guesses are that heavily used LTE should be sold mostly as a 3-7 megabit service. In particular, if widely used to watch quality video, the reliable speeds will be far below the "up to" figures. Nearly all the carriers are considering a very low cap, too low to support video watching for more than a few hours/week.

      Verizon and just about everyone else thinks that LTE is a niche data play until 2012-2013, when voice and data phones become plausibly priced. Verizon has a huge buildout for 2011-2012, but their predictions of customer numbers are low until sky-rocketing in 2012-2013.

Meraki mesh networks like this have proven extraordinarily effective wiring communities. John Bicket and Sanjit Biswas created the company out of the work they did at MIT on Project Rooftop, connecting much of Cambridge. After initial excitement about mesh, many results were disappointing but Meraki is now being praised by users and the technology is deployed in 143 countries. Cisco has also provided important gear and support.

Nearly all the outreach has been via twitter, http://twitter.com/smartnetnyc . The style is informal; a node went down in a snowstorm and the announcement was "we'll fix it after it stops snowing."

It's all coordinated from an equipment filled small office in the South Bronx by Doug Frazier and Stu Reid, who have been bringing cable TV and the Internet to the South Bronx since 1986.

Customers tell us it is life changing,” claims Guy Laurence, Vodafone UK CEO, who has just dropped the price of the “Sure Signal” box 70%. That's wildly exaggerated, of course, even if you live in a basement; your life isn't ruined if you have to use a landline at home, or VOIP over your broadband connection. Femtos and/or WiFi phones are a crucial strategy at nearly every mobile telco, because they move traffic from wireless networks to landlines. The £50 is the cash price for current customers, but Vodafone will also include a femto essentially for free as part of bundles for new customers.

   In 2008, nearly all mobile operators realized there's a huge potential saving and includied either a femto or WiFi phones in their (private) plans. If AT&T invests $500M to deploy a cloud of 10M femtos across the U.S., that saves them two or three times as much just in spectrum costs. One Vodafone femto can handle up to four simultaneous calls, and 32 is possible. No carrier has announced plans to use home femtos for neighbors and passerbys, but that's a logical next step. It will need careful limits, especially on low speed upstreams.

   A particularly interesting newcomer to femtos is Free.fr, where they are ready to offer a femto as an option with the Freebox even though they don't expect to begin their wireless service until 2012. A standalone femto in small carrier quantities goes for about $100 today, while AT&T received bids around $50 for their planned (but unconfirmed) rollout of 10M. By incorporating that into a box with a power supply, intelligence, antenna, etc., the cost is probably halved. With single chip femtos hitting the market, adding one to an existing broadband box will get cheaper every year. I'd guess Xavier will be able to add a femto in 2013 for $15-30, cheap enough for a payback in months just marketing and spectrum/bandwidth savings.

Nadine Manjaro of ABI forecasts 34M subscribers by 2011, nearly none with voice. Verizon is even more cautious, projecting low subscriber counts until 2012, then a boom. Brough Taylor points to another reason not to expect much before 2011-2012. “If every other release has taken ~3 years from specs complete to commercial deployments, why is LTE going to be so much faster?”

The timing will be very different depending on the country. TeliaSonera, Tele2 and Telenor have announced in Scandinavia. NTT & KDDI will go quickly in Japan, although Softbank is holding back for capex reasons. MetroPCS and U.S. Cellular are joining Verizon in the U.S. They have limited spectrum and the efficiency of 4G appeals to them. China Mobile is set for 2011. 34M is a negligible fraction of mobile users and not enough to have much effect on the competitive dynamic. China is around 700M mobiles, India 400M, and while I don't have a figure handy I think the world count is soon 3B, increasing at a ferocious rate in the developing world.