This was a clear indication of where Vodafone NZ is looking but perhaps more of a taster of what’s coming down the pipeline.

According to Vodafone NZ the demo went well - HDTV video conferencing over a mobile link was running at 30Mbit/s downstream. The picture was so clear you could read a newspaper over the link!

Vodafone then a streamed a HD movie and went on to play a car racing game on a PS3 or Xbox. That seriously flew with the latency of 10ms - although the technicians had set up the race game with all the realism settings on high so the first guy blew the engine by over revving, the second guy stalled on the line!

A representative from Vodafone said “LTE is a very smart piece of kit. It figures out what kind of application you’re using and manages your bandwidth accordingly, so you don’t get someone using 155Mbit/s for a voice call. All the HDTV applications needed was 30Mbit/s down, so that’s all it allocated.” Very nice…

So far we have seen some of the biggest operators throw thir weight behind LTE and many expect others to follow the likes of NTT DoCoMo, Verizon and France Telecom. But what about the smaller operators? With WiMAX being chosen by many small operators who especially in emerging markets and TDD licences being much chpeaer then FDD licences, this has allowed small operators and new start ups to enter the market to provide 3G services.

MetroPCS, one of the smaller CDMA operators in the USA recently announced that it will be migrating to LTE. Although, no dates have been set for deployment and many details still need to be finalised, this is very positive news for the LTE camp, especially as they are not a GSM operator for whom with would be a more natural migration path.

So, will other smaller sized operators go the same way? It still isn’t certain that operators such as MetroPCS are looking to provide high speed data services to thier customers as many operators have said that they want to focus on making the most of current 3G networks. However, could this be an strategy by MetroPCS to set up roaming agreements with other LTE operators in the US?

Which will be the technology of choice for operators over the next two years or so? With Mobilkom in Austria, demonstrating the worlds fastest I-HSPA/HSPA+ call with Nokia, LTE will have to wait its turn and a WiMAX deployment seems unlikely. But what are other operators likely to do? Is HSPA+ having a negative affect on LTE? What about UMTS 900?

With the industry giants Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson coming to a mutual agreement on keeping IPR patent royalties below 10%, what will this mean for other vendors? Many innovative manufacturing companies and innovative start ups thar rely on selling IPR may become marginalised. Is such an agreement necessary? Why didn’t Motorola and Qualcomm sign up?

Earlier today I was talking with Yves Bellago of France Telecom about spectrum availability and whether 20MHz channels are possible. It was interesting to hear that he thought that 20MHz channels might be available in the 21GHz band and possibly the 1800MHz band but also believed that operators could get the benefits of LTE with 10MHz channels.

Yves Bellago, who is talking at LTE World Summit in the latter part of May, felt that 10MHz channels will provide improved spectral efficiency, capacity and latency in all bands that LTE services will require and I myself believe these 10MHz channels may also be obtained from the digital dividend. Opinions people??