Earlier this week at the Rogers LTE event Reade Barber, Senior Director Data Product Management, said their subscriber numbers in Ottawa have already “exceeded their expectations”, unfortunately he gave no hard numbers for competitive reasons. When Toronto goes live on September 28th, followed by Montreal and Vancouver by the end of the year will increase the LTE adoption and devices. Rogers will release an LTE-enabled HTC smartphone, plus the anticipated Samsung Galaxy S II along with a tablet (probably the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9).
Bell announced they will deploy LTE before the end of 2011, but gave no dates or insights into which Canadian cities. In a recent internal Bell document on April 29th stated that “Bell has completed 4G LTE trials and we are currently deploying LTE as well. Our competitors will not get in front of Bell’s network leadership. We do not make announcements about our competitive network or product plans that are too far in advance of their actual availability to customers.”
Well, Rogers clearly came to market first with LTE, but new rumours have surfaced that Bell will announce their plans “soon”. A reliable source over at TekTok says that when Bell launches their LTE network they will also release the Samsung Galaxy S II LTE and Galaxy Tab 8.9. No word on the prices or when the network will be turned on. We reached out to a few of our tipsters and they heard that the next big Bell launch will be a couple new devices to their “Superphone” category sometime in November.
LTE in Canada is coming along very well. Rogers, Bell in 2011… TELUS and SaskTel will follow in 2012.
With the limited selection of LTE devices, competition between carriers will come down to the monthly data plan prices.
Update: We just heard from our friends at Samsung who confirmed to us that the LTE Samsung Galaxy S II is NOT going to Bell, but the Tab 8.9 eventually could make its way there.
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
