LAS VEGAS--Long-term evolution may not be so long term after all. As operators rally behind the standard, the wireless industry vendor community is ramping up the development of their radio access gear—or at least giving the appearance of doing so.

The first WiMAX networks are rolling out, placing pressure on traditional wireless operators to match their broadband wireless capabilities, either with their current 3G infrastructure or with 4G. Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, AT&T and a handful of other global operators’ commitments to LTE have established an early market for what was once a technology of the far future. The result: vendors have pushed development timelines from their original estimates of 2010 and 2011 to as early as 2008 for field trials and 2009 for commercial deployments. And over the last two months they seem to be pushing that envelope further, doing so because of a demand from their customers.

“It’s not just only the operators and consumers asking for it, but also the device makers are much more prepared” Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski said at the CTIA’s keynote infrastructure panel today. Unlike 3G, which was developed and deployed “piecemeal,” Zafirovski said, there is a highly unified effort from carriers, vendors, device makers and content providers to see LTE go commercial—it’s not just the vendors driving the technology.

Ericsson on Tuesday announced what it purports to be first commercial LTE device platform on the market, a feat of no small audacity considering that the final LTE standard still isn’t finalized. The basic LTE specifications for the Radio Access Network and IP core passed 3GPP muster, but the final standard still faces review before becoming codified. That hasn’t stopped vendors from trying to jump ahead of the curve to gain whatever market advantage the can.

At Mobile World Congress, Nokia Siemens Networks unveiled a new Flexi base station that would be software upgradable to LTE, and at CTIA Wireless this week said that Flexi kit would support both the new 700 MHz and Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) bands. In February, Alcatel-Lucent partnered with NEC to jointly build an LTE kit, in part to accelerate the two vendor’s time to market. At this week’s show, Motorola sought to catch the eye of CDMA operators considering LTE by demoing IP-to-IP call hand-off between CDMA to LTE radios. Nortel also had a pre-commercial LTE kit running live over the AWS frequencies. And even new market entrant Huawei had an LTE base station on hand.

But Ericsson is the only one claiming to have an LTE chipset ready for shipment. The M700 multimode platform would support channel sizes from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz with a maximum theoretical speed of 100 Mb/s on the downlink and 50 Mb/s on the uplink. What a commercial LTE-capable solution is, exactly, is open to interpretation. Vendors like LG Electronics have already produced prototype devices loaded with some form of LTE silicon. Ericsson won’t begin sampling the device modules until later this year, and commercial shipments won’t begin until 2009. That would put the first Ericsson-powered LTE devices on the market in 2010, the same timeline most of the industry is forecasting.

Whether the industry is truly accelerating LTE development or just creating the perception of that acceleration, the pressure to do so is definitely there. Much of that pressure to do so is coming from WiMAX. If Sprint succeeds in the U.S. in rolling out a WiMAX network this year, it will have mobile broadband running for two full years ahead of its competitors, and that’s assuming the industry’s most optimistic estimates of commercial LTE rollouts in late 2009. And if WiMAX establishes itself in that interim, the industry may find itself revisiting the technology wars that pitted the GSM and CDMA communities a decade ago.

That threat has earned the ire of the CEO of the world’s largest operator. Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin in his CTIA keynote today warned that pitting WiMAX against LTE would only waste resources and time and put the whole industry at risk. “I was there for the CDMA-TDMA wars, and when the GSM-WCDMA wars were going on,” Sarin said. “Those wars produced very little. What we need to learn from our history is the need for a common encompassing standard.”

Sarin proposed that standard be LTE, a stance that he first took at Mobile World Congress last month. It can’t be a stance that will make the vendors very happy since most of them have invested heavily in both WiMAX and LTE product lines. Particularly Nortel and Motorola, which weren’t able to compete in the 3G UMTS spaces, have taken up the WiMAX mantle as means to revitalize their infrastructure businesses.

Sarin’s plea to the industry produced an uncomfortable moment at today’s infrastructure panel when its moderator, Verizon Wireless CEO and CTIA chairman Lowell McAdam, cited Sarin’s speech. While Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg jumped at the opportunity to call for a single global standard (Ericsson has no WiMAX business), Alcatel-Lucent CEO Pat Russo and Nortel Zafirovski were forced on the defensive. “I still think we’re going to see a co-existence of the two for some time,” Russo said.

The WiMAX Forum this week projected that there would be 133 million WiMAX subscribers globally by 2012, which is right about when the first large-scale LTE networks will finish rolling out. Those subscribers likely will be highly distributed across the world. The vast majority of the 260 deployments of WiMAX involve small operators or big operator trials. Sprint, Korea Telecom and a handful of large-scale deployments in developing countries are definitely the exception.

There is the possibility that major operators will jump on the WiMAX bandwagon if WiMAX lives up to its promises and LTE fails to materialize on time. LTE, however, has gained the momentum as of late, and the vendors appear eager to lock in operator commitments by selling their GSM customers 3G gear that can be later upgraded to LTE. NSN and Ericsson are both promising that the base stations their customers buy today will run LTE in the future.

One of the side-effects of rolling WiMAX into the LTE standard might be even further consolidation among wireless vendors. Multiple technologies allow the vendors to carve out market niches. One thing, all three CEOs on the panel agreed upon is that there would be room for only a handful vendors in 4G whether or not it became a unified standard.

“Think about how many competitors there were for 3G,” Svanberg said. “There were a lot more than there are now.”