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?
