LTE is generating excitement in the world of consumer electronics and ever-faster online video viewing, but the 4G (fourth-generation) mobile network technology may have even greater implications for specific industries that lack a good means of connectivity.

Texas Energy Network, a startup in Houston, will focus on the oil and gas industry in an LTE (Long-Term Evolution) test next week. Using equipment from Alcatel-Lucent, TEN hopes to demonstrate that LTE can bring more economical Internet access to drilling and exploration sites in the vast oil fields of the Permian Basin, which spans western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.

Most of the oil drilling in this region of about 25 counties takes place far from the populated areas where most cellular networks are concentrated, said TEN Chief Technology Officer Stan Hughey. As a result, oil and gas companies often are on their own when it comes to sending critical real-time data such as flow, pressure and volume from equipment in the field, he said. When mobile exploration teams are out looking for new fields, they need to make audio and video calls and generate large amounts of geological data that needs to be sent back to headquarters.

TEN, led by former Qwest Communications International (Q) executive Gregory Casey, wants to be an independent service provider for these companies, setting up and managing its own network. So far, the company is only looking at LTE.

“It appears to us it’s becoming a de facto standard,” Hughey said. Most mobile operators around the world that plan to deploy 4G networks have chosen LTE, a trend that bodes well for relatively high-volume, low-cost client devices once networks go live. Having a wide selection of clients was an important factor for TEN, Hughey said.

Today, most oil and gas companies rely on narrowband point-to-point wireless links (comparable to dial-up) using unlicensed radio spectrum, according to Hughey. Some lay fiber across their oil fields. For exploration, which requires high bandwidth and mobility, they often use satellite VSATs (very small aperture terminals). These can offer more than 1M bps (bit per second) but at a higher cost and with more delay than LTE, he said. It’s also likely that LTE client equipment will be much less expensive than VSATs, Hughey said.

The test will use one base station and last about a week, according to Alcatel-Lucent. The oil industry presents different challenges from consumer mobile data networks, said Mark Madden, Alcatel’s regional vice president of energy markets in the Americas. As with utilities setting up smart grids, the main purpose of the network is to send many small streams of data in from the field, he said. “The needs of the entire energy sector are uplink-focused,” Madden said.

The other difference is that the geographic reach of a base station is more important than densely packing base stations into an area to cover many simultaneous users. Alcatel is hoping to demonstrate its LTE base station working over a range of 20 miles, Madden said.

Alcatel said players in a number of vertical industries including health care, transportation and public safety have expressed interest in LTE. But this will be the first time Alcatel actually demonstrates LTE for an energy-sector application, Madden said.

Before it can move from tests to deployment, TEN will need radio spectrum licenses across the region. The company is now talking with several spectrum holders, Hughey said. The company plans to use paired spectrum, with one band for upstream and one for downstream traffic. It’s not clear yet what spectrum TEN will be able to use, but the company would like to tap into the 700MHz band, the same range that Verizon Wireless plans to use for its LTE network, coming later this year. In general, the 700MHz band offers greater reach per cell site than higher bands.

Alcatel said it could adapt to different bands depending on where TEN gets its licenses. Alcatel wouldn’t comment on how much bandwidth its equipment could deliver, saying that depends on how much spectrum TEN has.

If LTE works as expected and the frequencies are available, it will probably take between 12 and 18 months to roll out the network, TEN’s Hughey estimated. The service provider hopes later to expand to other parts of the U.S. and potentially other countries.

However, the company remains focused on the oil and gas industries. If it does allow private residents of the Permian Basin to hop on to the LTE network, its service-level agreements with oil companies will have to come first, Hughey said.

“You wouldn’t want somebody throwing a slingbox on there and taking bandwidth off the network,” Hughey said.

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Apple Inc.’s iPhone is outdistancing the pack of phones that use Google Inc.’s rival software, thanks to video-calling features, a sharper screen and its array of 225,000 applications, analysts said.

The iPhone 4, unveiled yesterday by Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, is thinner, has better resolution and adds a front- facing camera. It also sports a new type of glass and a stainless-steel band that Apple says is designed to improve network reception.

Apple is counting on the product to fend off mounting competition from Android, a smartphone operating system developed by Google Inc. The iPhone is evolving fast enough to keep competitors at bay, even if the new version lacks any major surprises, said William Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones in St. Louis.

“They remain the technology innovation leader,” Kreher said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “While nothing was really revolutionary in terms of the new features, I think that Apple took a nice step forward.”

Jobs, who unveiled the phone at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, downplayed the threat from Android. The iPhone was the No. 2 smartphone in the U.S. in the first quarter, with a 28 percent share, he said, citing Nielsen Co. data. Research In Motion Ltd. ranked first, with a 35 percent share, while Android-based devices accounted for 9 percent.

Gizmodo Leak

Though many of the iPhone 4’s enhancements were expected — a prototype of the iPhone was dissected and photographed by technology blog Gizmodo.com in April — the upgrade provides Apple with some exclusive capabilities, said Shaw Wu, an analyst with Kaufman Bros. LP in San Francisco.

“The new features and software further differentiate the iPhone from competitors,” he said. Wu recommends buying the shares, which he doesn’t own.

Even so, the new abilities come with caveats. The video- calling program, called FaceTime, will be limited to Wi-Fi networks for now. That means customers won’t be able to make video calls using AT&T Inc., the exclusive U.S. wireless carrier for the iPhone. And while the phone can tap fourth-generation networks, that technology won’t be ready from AT&T until the middle of next year.

In a reminder that Apple’s new features are dependent on the reliability of wireless networks, Jobs struggled to get some new tools to work during his presentation.

Wi-Fi Disruption

The trouble stemmed from a bad Wi-Fi connection, rather than AT&T’s service. Jobs asked attendees to shut off the wireless connections on their computers and mobile hot spots because of interference, saying, “I’d like you to look around and police each other.”

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, fell $5.03, or 2 percent, to $250.94 yesterday in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has gained 19 percent this year. The day’s drop mirrored a 1.9 percent decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500 information-technology index.

When Apple’s first iPhone appeared in 2007, its touch- screen design and app-based interface shook up the market. Research In Motion and other mobile-phone makers clambered to add similar features to their devices. Since then, the industry’s rapid-fire advancements have made it harder for an upstart to catch up quickly, said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc.

“Apple and its competitors are steadily bringing better and better technology and software to go with it to the market,” he said. “In that environment, it’s difficult to leapfrog the competition in the same way the iPhone did when it was first introduced.”

Top Seller

The iPhone is now Apple’s top product, generating 40 percent of revenue last quarter — more than the Macintosh computer. The company has three products that work with its App Store: the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. All together, Apple will have sold 100 million of those devices by sometime this month.

Jobs said yesterday that there are more than 225,000 apps available. The company has paid out more than $1 billion to developers, who get a 70 percent share of the programs sold through the store, he said. Android developers, meanwhile, have only created about 50,000 apps, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

The iPhone 4 adds a camera for capturing high-definition video, as well as software that makes video chatting possible. Its so-called retina display packs four times as many pixels in the 3.5-inch screen, delivering higher-resolution text, photos and videos. New iPhone operating-system software, called iOS 4, supports features such as multitasking — the ability to run more than one application at the same time.

‘Razzle-Dazzle’

The iPhone 4, set to debut in the U.S. and four other countries, also is about 24 percent thinner than its predecessor, the iPhone 3GS. A 16-gigabyte model will cost $199, and a 32-gigabyte version will sell for $299.

“It will have enough razzle-dazzle,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos. in Minneapolis, who attended yesterday’s gathering. He rates Apple shares “overweight” and doesn’t own them.

Apple, which has delivered a new iPhone every year since it first came out, sees the fourth-generation device as “the biggest leap” in design and functionality in three years.

An advertising system called iAd will be built into the new iPhone software, giving creators of apps a new way to make money. Software developers will get a 60 percent cut of revenue from ads placed within their apps. After eight weeks of taking orders, Apple said yesterday that it has commitments for $60 million in advertising for the second half of the year.

With iAd, Apple is less concerned about making money directly from the system, Kreher said. It’s more about making its software and mobile devices more attractive for developers — and creating one more way to distinguish itself from Google.

“They just want to cultivate a better ecosystem for developers and advertisers to be comfortable in working with them,” Kreher said. “It’s really just about getting more people on board then driving the bottom line.”

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There aren’t many details yet, but according to the guys over at BGR, some AT&T employees have confirmed that the iPhone 4G will be launched in June. That seems pretty fast since it’s scheduled to be unveiled in early June.

But maybe Apple wants to just get it over with at this point since the cat was let out of the bag awhile ago. If this is true you won’t have to wait long at all.

We’ll find out soon enough.

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