By the time Verizon and T-Mobile get these deployed in any usable areas, Samsung will be on the S11 or S12. The standards are still not set in stone. . . and with the record of Android updates how do you know that the firm ware will get updated on the S8 to update to what that standard will be, if indeed it can be updated with firmware? It won't even be at 1.0 until sometime in July 2017. Samsung is merely hoping. . . and Verizon and T-Mobile will not move on it until the standard is set, because they won't gamble billions of dollars on a guess as to what that standard is going to be just to get a jump on the competition who also is not gambling for the same reason because there is simply ZERO advantage to having LTE-U in a few markets ahead of the competition.
“By the time Verizon and T-Mobile get these deployed in any usable areas, Samsung will be on the S11 or S12. The standards are still not set in stone. . . and with the record of Android updates how do you know that the firm ware will get updated on the S8 to update to what that standard will be, if indeed it can be updated with firmware? It won’t even be at 1.0 until sometime in July 2017. Samsung is merely hoping. . . and Verizon and T-Mobile will not move on it until the standard is set, because they won’t gamble billions of dollars on a guess as to what that standard is going to be just to get a jump on the competition who also is not gambling for the same reason because there is simply ZERO advantage to having LTE-U in a few markets ahead of the competition. “
FCC approved and deployed ....
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/22/freshly-fcc-approved-lte-u-wireless-rolls-out-on-t-mobile/
https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/lte-u-launch.htm
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/04/t-mobile-announces-launch-lte-u-service-select-areas.html