Japan signs off on carriers' LTE plans
It's not often that we have an opportunity to point and laugh at the crushing antiquity of anything in Japan. Look, don't get your hopes up, we can't really do it here either -- but with LTE, it seems like the rest of the world has finally reached technological parity. Japan has just gotten around to approving its 4G carriers' game plans, with NTT DoCoMo likely first out of the gate thanks to deployments in 2010 (around the same time that Verizon expects to have some markets in action). eMobile, Softbank, and current CDMA carrier KDDI will follow on through 2011, with a grand total of over a trillion yen (about $10.4B) being spent in the next half decade. Don't get us wrong -- we're sure the handsets will still be cooler than anything we can get, and they'll likely have the entire country blanketed in 4G before most others have just a handful of cities live, but at least they're not on 5G. Yet.
[Via IntoMobile, thanks Lauren]
