Bill Schrier, Seattle's chief technology officer. (Patrick Hagerty/PSBJ)

Seattle police will someday be able to stream live video back and forth between headquarters, not just record it in their patrol cars. When emergency personnel from the city help with disasters in other parts of the country, their communications handsets will actually work there.

And those devices will come at a fraction of the current cost.

That’s part of the vision laid out by Seattle officials in their application for a $17 million federal grant to help blanket the city with a new kind of high-speed wireless network for use by city departments, hospitals, colleges and low-income Seattle Housing Authority residents.

It’s one example of the potential of LTE, which stands for Long Term Evolution, an up-and-coming fourth-generation (4G) wireless standard that promises much faster mobile internet access than existing 3G networks, on a wider variety of devices than competing 4G standards.

LTE will bring new opportunities — and potential threats — to companies such as Clearwire, T-Mobile USA and dozens of smaller firms in the wireless industry. Several early LTE projects are unfolding in the region, giving Seattle a key role in shaping the future of the technology.

Verizon Wireless, which conducted early tests of LTE in Seattle and Boston, is expected to announce customer trials in five markets, including Seattle, within the next several weeks. The company expects to formally bring LTE to market in Seattle and other cities by the end of the year, starting with wireless laptop cards, to be followed later by LTE-based consumer mobile phones. Verizon says data speeds over LTE will be about 10 times faster than with 3G networks common on mobile phones today.

Kirkland-based Clearwire, a champion of an older 4G standard known as WiMAX, recently announced plans to conduct LTE trials of its own, starting in Arizona, to test the technology’s potential.

Clearwire's John Saw

Clearwire says it is waiting to see the results of the tests before deciding whether to fully embrace LTE, but the company’s chief technology officer, John Saw, is already touting the competitive advantages of a potential Clearwire LTE network, compared with expected offerings from Verizon and AT&T.

Because Clearwire owns more wireless spectrum, it is in a position to leverage broad channels for uploading and downloading data from devices, Saw said in an interview. With one variety of LTE, the company has cited the potential for download speeds ranging from 20 to 70 megabits per second (mbps) — considerably more than the five to 12 mps that Verizon cited in initial tests.

“That allows us to be disruptive and provide something differentiated in the marketplace,” Saw said.

At the same time, the LTE tests put Clearwire in an awkward position, given the large investments of time and money that the company has made to build out its WiMAX network in recent years. Did it bet on the wrong standard? Saw says Clearwire doesn’t see LTE vs. WiMAX as an either-or proposition. As part of its tests, the company is examining the practicality and effectiveness of operating LTE and WiMAX together in the same market.

But not everyone is convinced that LTE is ready for prime time. Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA, for one, is holding off for now — citing factors including the standard’s initial lack of support for voice calls and messaging, and the strength of T-Mobile’s own High-Speed Packet Access Plus (HSPA+) mobile broadband network.

T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom operates LTE networks overseas, so the company understands the long-term potential, said Mark McDiarmid, T-Mobile USA’s senior director of engineering and operations. But he described LTE as “a bolt-on technology” for now.

“It doesn’t play well with voice at all,” he said. “Effectively, the first instances of those products, if they have voice at all, are going to have to support chips which have voice and 3G in them, and chips that have LTE. That’s going to lead to a less well-integrated experience, at least in the medium term.”

Potential problems in such dual-network devices include reduced battery life.

Verizon said its new LTE devices will have voice and messaging capabilities, but those features will run on non-LTE Verizon networks upon launch. Scott Charlston, a Verizon Wireless spokesman, said the company will continue to support its existing 3G networks well into the future.

Some analysts expect Verizon to charge a premium for LTE data plans, at least at the outset, but the company hasn’t yet announced the pricing structure for the LTE upcoming rollout.

The city of Seattle, meanwhile, is slated to learn by Sept. 30 whether it will receive the $17 million U.S. Department of Commerce grant to finance the bulk of a municipal LTE network. If it gets the grant, the city expects to have a network operational within three years, developed through a public-private partnership with city agencies and selected technology companies.

“It’s a big deal,” said Bill Schrier, Seattle’s chief technology officer. The city would be able to shift from a proprietary communications network to one based on more widely used technology standards, translating into lower costs and better compatibility with networks elsewhere.

The overall size of the project is $23 million, requiring the city to come up with $6 million in matching funds. However, Schrier said much of that remainder would come from "in kind" investments.

"For example, the City and its partners have already constructed a 500+ mile fiber network inside the the City which connects every library, Seattle public school, community college, UW facility and major city or county facility in the city," he said via email. "Since we've invested local funds in this network, the network can be used as a match because it will connect the LTE cell sites."

Seattle is one of 21 jurisdictions in the U.S. (including New York City and New York State, New Mexico, San Francisco, LA, and others) that have received authority from the FCC to deploy LTE public safety networks for use by police, fire and emergency medical.

The city’s project, dubbed Seattle Net, would require 30 to 50 cellular sites, but Schrier said the city would not build new towers in neighborhoods. Instead, it would put the LTE equipment on existing structures, such as fire stations or Seattle Housing Authority buildings, providing internet access to low-income residents of those buildings as part of the process.

In general, the rollout of LTE networks by wireless providers isn’t expected to require the construction of new cellular towers or sites. The equipment required for LTE is generally smaller than older wireless equipment, and wireless companies say they will be able to use space at existing sites.

[Related Document: Read a summary of the city's application here: PDF, 3 pages. Note: The financial cost of the project has been reduced since the filing, so those numbers are outdated in the summary.]

As an example of LTE’s benefits, Schrier cited police and firefighter radios that currently cost the city thousands of dollars each. With the proposed network, he said, LTE handsets could cost about $500.

While that degree of hardware savings doesn’t apply to the consumer phone market, it’s the same promise of standardization that’s driving the industry trend toward LTE over WiMAX, said Monica Paolini, president of the Senza Fili Consulting firm in Sammamish, which advises companies on wireless issues. Because the major wireless carriers have been embracing LTE as their future standard, device makers are expected to support LTE with a larger array of compatible products.

“It all depends on what the customers want,” Paolini explained. “The customers don’t care whether it’s WiMAX or LTE — they want a phone that they like.”

That potential choice in hardware is a key factor playing into Clearwire’s tests of LTE, said Saw, the company’s technology chief. The company is essentially hedging its bets with the LTE tests.

“If the LTE ecosystem really blossoms the way people are predicting, and we are able to get cheaper devices for customers and offer more choices for customers, then we could be deploying LTE,” he said. “But nothing is a done deal until it’s done. Right now we are in a good position with WiMAX, we are going to keep building WiMAX, but we are also keeping an eye on LTE, and if the ecosystem takes off ... we will be more than ready.”