Huawei has packed a lot of speed into its latest mobile hotspot. The rather awkwardly named E589 FDD is intended to push the limits of current LTE technologies, offering peak speeds of 100 Mbps, which it can redistribute to as many as 10 Wi-Fi devices. The catch is that the hotspot is only available in Japan, because that’s where the only network resides that can support it.
In January, I wrote about eAccess building the mother of LTE networks, and this month it’s set to launch. By maximizing the technical standards of LTE to the hilt, eAccess is building a network that can support theoretical capacities of 300 Mbps, so while Huawei’s device is impressive, it’s not even taking advantage of the network capabilities. I should be able to support the peak speeds eAccess is advertising to its customers, 75 Mbps – not too shabby considering U.S. LTE networks top out at about 25 Mbps.
It will be a while before U.S. networks can support such eye-popping speeds – U.S. operators don’t have such large contiguous spectrum blocks – but that’s probably a good thing. At today’s mobile data pricing, consumers could eat up their monthly gigabyte allocations within days, if not hours, especially if they’re connecting multiple devices to a hotspot.
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