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Intel aims at China with its speedy LTE Cat 6 solution, shipping in Q2 this year

Marking Intel's 29th year in China, CEO Brian Krzanich took the stage at IDF Shenzhen with a little surprise: his company will be shipping its first Cat 6 multi-mode LTE solution, the XMM 7260, in Q2 this year. This follows the XMM 7160 that started shipping with Cat 4 LTE and half the number of basebands last October. The new solution has added support for China's popular TD-SCDMA plus TD-LTE networks, along with the usual 2G GSM, WCDMA plus FDD-LTE around the world. With Cat 6 LTE's carrier aggregation mode, the XMM 7260 can reach a top theoretical speed of 300Mbps, which is twice that of Cat 4 LTE.

There's no word on who will be shipping the first mobile devices featuring Intel's speedy modem, but Krzanich did use a development device -- powered by Intel's SoFIA Atom processor -- to make a live Skype video call over LTE with Lenovo's CEO Yang Yuanqing in Hong Kong, so we'll take that as a hint. But of course, this doesn't mean that Lenovo will be ditching its good friend MediaTek, who will be catching up with its own LTE solution very soon.