Apple’s (News - Alert) interm CEO Tim Cook’s concern about LTE chipsets was worthy of discussion in my 4GWE article this week. However, I have been hanging out with some friends who like the bleeding edge and every device they love uses Verizon Wireless including their tablet solutions.

Now that tablets are very cool, the Motorola Xoom and the Google (News - Alert) CR-48 are worthy of your attention.

If you were go to nationwide carriers -- or for that matter, smaller carriers – which are taking advantage of the FCC’s (News - Alert) recent order for “must carry” data roaming services, you will find a competitive market.

So how do you decide what to use and with whom?

An interesting study by Deepak Kataria of IPJunction Inc. suggests that in the expansion to 4G solutions the place where smartphone growth is going to impact network congestion the most is on the signaling side.

This represents an interesting quandary, as the carriers look to provide Quality of Service since the impact of the signals for enabling QoS may be subject to the congestion along with the increased traffic.

Now in LTE signaling is part of the same packet core that is used for the rest of the transmission, while in the HSPA the signaling is contained to maintain the channel.

The problem is that with LTE right now the signaling traffic can expand eight fold independent of the tendency for video and other data intense solutions.

Not that M2M will be stagnant; the expectation is that M2M will have over 100 Million cellular modules by 2015 according to a study by Josh Builta of IMS Research.

The growth will be in vertical markets and represent a worldwide drive in automotive telematics and healthcare.

Meanwhile, embedded wireless modules with WiFi (News - Alert) will hit a Billion by end of year -- and there will be 2.2 billion WiFi chips in 2015, as reported by Jagdish Rebello, PhD of I-Suppli research.

The bottom line is that when choosing a partner the logical near term solutions are not the answers in the long term. Too big for our networks the ubiquity of the past points to HSPA, the traffic of today points to WiFi and the mobility of our future points to LTE.