TeliaSonera gears up to ship first dual-mode LTE / 3G USB WWAN modem

Care about Samsung‘s GT-B3730? Probably not… but what if we told you that that very device is the planet’s first commercially available dual-mode LTE / 3G WWAN modem? Now that we’ve got your attention, you may be interested in knowing that overseas operator TeliaSonera — hailed as the first carrier on the planet to fire up an LTE network and make it available to Joe and Jane last year — is just about ready to start shipping the aforesaid Samsung. As of now, the only way to hop onto their LTE superhighway is with a 4G-only modem, and while it had promised a two-faced stick in the second quarter of 2010, we’re elated to finally put a face to a promise. The primary downside is that there’s no current way for the USB modem to switch from LTE to 3G (or vice-versa) on the fly; instead, you’ll need to kill the connection and start a new one when you leave / enter a 4G zone. Purportedly, the stick will play nice with both Windows and OS X, and it can hit real-world download rates as high as 80Mbps and upload rates of 16Mbps. Suddenly, a relocation to Sweden seems altogether more inviting, no?

TeliaSonera gears up to ship first dual-mode LTE / 3G USB WWAN modem originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  PC World  | Email this | Comments

This post is tagged: aforesaid, Attention, carrier, connection, download, downside, dual-mode, EDT, Engadget, face, fly, gears, GT-B, LTE, MBPs, modem, nbsp, network, os x, overseas operator, PC World, Permalink, planet, promise, Purportedly, real world, relocation, Samsung, second quarter, stick, superhighway, sweden, teliasonera, upload, usb modem, use, way, year