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LTE-Advanced will bring huge gains, but some of the more radical claims about it should be taken with a grain of salt.

LTE-Advanced will bring huge gains in speeds, capacity and network efficiency and may even lead to a big drop in the cost of mobile data, among other things. But the LTE-Advanced networks that Sprint, AT&T and Clearwire will deploy in 2013 won’t be the 1 Gbps monstrosities that the standard calls for. Rather, they will be works in progress -- iterative networks that will gradually grow faster and more efficient as operators get more spectrum and gain access to more-powerful technologies.