Ericsson Tuesday unveiled its first commercially available LTE capable platform. Products in the M700 series will deliver bandwidth of up to 100M bps (bits per second) in the downlink and up to 50M bps in the uplink.

LTE (Long Term Evolution) is one of many alternatives competing for next-generation mobile networks.

The launch is a way for Ericsson to show LTE is on track, during a week when it's going head to head with WiMax, and other mobile technologies, at CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas.

"We want to show LTE is real, and on the way," said Björn Ekelund, vice president, product management at Ericsson.

Commercial release is set for next year, although samples will ship this year. Real products based on the platform are expected to be ready in 2010, Ericsson said.

It is a statement of readiness for the new standard, according to Gartner Research Director Alan Brown.

"But in my opinion it does seem rather early for an announcement as the first products, according to Ericsson's own statement, will not appear until 2010," said Brown.

The first products based on M700 will not be phones, but data centric devices, such as different kinds of laptop modems, according to Ekelund.

One presumptive customer is Sony Ericsson, but it doesn't want to give any details about upcoming products. It will wait until there is customer demand, according to Rikard Skogberg, category manager at Sony Ericsson.

Besides the need for capacity that can challenge fixed networks, Ericsson also underscores support for a multitude of different frequencies.

"New frequencies are popping up left and right, and supporting them all is difficult, but we have to keep up," said Ekelund.

He singles out 700MHz in America, and 1500 MHz in Japan, but the platform can support up six different bands.