Microsoft announced today that in December, it will launch a Surface Pro integrating LTE Advanced support to its professional customers. Panos Panay, Microsoft's Executive Vice President for Windows Devices, made the announcement at the company's Future Decoded event in London.
In the announcement, Panay argues that as the global workforce evolves, being a mobile worker will become the new default for many. "The office is no longer limited to a set of buildings – it's at home, in a cafe, a city around the world or in an airplane," he writes. "With so many changing locations your device becomes your office, and many of our customers tell us that it's what their surface is for them – a mobile office."
This is of course where the Surface Pro is registered with LTE Advanced. Microsoft says the new Pro will feature a Cat 9 modem and support for 20 cellbands, so it should go to almost every country in the world (assuming your roaming plan does not bankrupt you when you use your Surface Pro with LTE Advanced for streaming Netflix abroad). The promise of LTE Advanced is higher bandwidth and Microsoft promises download speeds of up to 450 Mbps, compared to around 300 Mbps for a standard Cat 6 modem that you will find in other current LTE devices.
All this connectivity is not very useful if your device runs out of battery after half an hour, of course. For the Surface Pro, Microsoft expects 17 hours of video playback time. This does not tell us much about how the device will work with LTE enabled, but it should still be time consuming for most use cases.
The most basic version of the Surface Pro with these new connectivity options (Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD) will cost businesses $ 1,149 and the one with an i5 processor will double RAM and SSD storage 1 $ 449.