The move toward LTE networks will bring faster mobile broadband speeds to users. But application developers excited about the prospect of increased bandwidth and lower latency need to take a realistic view about LTE data speeds and how applications will function on the network, argues industry analyst Andrew Seybold. LTE cell sites, like any other, will deliver less capacity to users if more and more subscribers are using bandwidth-intensive applications. Furthermore, users will be falling back to 3G speeds for at least a few more years. Therefore, developers need to build data-aware applications that are as light on data usage as possible and designed to function acceptably at the lowest possible data rate--which will make them appear to be super fast when running over faster networks. Commentary
