Some thoughts:

I am going to be buying a Gemalto PLS8-US bandplan modem, for the fact 700MHz LTE deployment is imminent in my area, I am to confirm with my contacts in the carriers about the validity and expected timeframe of this rollout sometime early next year.

The other item of interest in the -US bandplan modem is access to the 1900MHz band, which I am in negotiations with the regulator here in Australia, the ACMA, for non-common carrier broadcast access to the 1900MHz band as a "spectrum squatter" for use with the OpenLTE project - an open source LTE network end-to-end.

They have not said a flat out "No" yet, their engineering department will get back to me in the New Year. They have indicated co-ordination with the licence holder to the 1900MHz band (but not user of the band in my Local Government Area, hopefully) is needed, and that is up to me to negotiate that co-ordination, they will only name the licence holder, not assist me with those negotiations.

My interest in the Neo900 project is for the open access to the modem - certainly not of its firmware (although if it were leaked like the modem firmware for the GTA02 was, I would count that anonymous person as my personal salvation), but to the command subsystem, and interrogation of the modems status, with is abstracted away in Android, and totally not present in iPhone.

Yes, I like to watch NetMon quite a bit. I'm also quite a bit strange.

My eventual goal with all of the tech is the absolute lowest humanly possible latency bound end to end network for the real time control of mobile robots in a cellular sites footprint. This, as you would be aware, would have many, many applications, and I want this network to be about as self organising as possible - so imbued with a degree of AI.

Anyway, those are some thoughts, certainly, we stand on the cusp of a great moment with the Neo900 and OpenLTE projects...!

Long live open source!

Shane.