We’re only in the first week of 2010 and it seems like one of the most hyped, most predicted new trends in the communications industry for the year is already starting to make some noticeable moves.

LTE (long term evolution) and 4G mobile communications networks are supposed to debut en masse this year, bringing with them drastically faster mobile broadband access speeds to all us junkies out there who love to YouFace and MyTube on the go.

4G networks are the next step up from the well-known 3G networks that currently give all the Droids, Nexuses and iPhones of the world their fastest access speeds to the networks they run on (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Spring, or what have you).

I hosted a call yesterday with TM Forum‘s Martin Creaner, talking to Communications Daily about the potential and promise for 4G launches in the coming year, and how the launch of these networks is actually a great chance for the communications industry to almost start fresh and develop common technologies that will let various 4G networks and their equipment work together more seamlessly.

Almost as if the 4G Gods were watching, during the call my TweetDeck popped up the latest news from GigaOm. You can check out the article here, which among other things talks about how Alcatel-Lucent and Verizon have recently made some meaningful technology leaps toward making these 4G networks work alongside current 3G technologies, which is a hugely important issue as 4G won’t be able to reach every corner of the globe the moment it is launched. Mobile broadband will be a hybrid of 3G and 4G for at least a few years.

There are expected to be roughly a dozen 4G launches by the end of 2010, and with a reasonable guess that access speeds will be somewhere between 5MB and 12MB/sec (up from a maximum of about 2Mb/sec on 3G), this does promise a big shift in how we consume broadband services and access our online lives.

As the GigaOm article says, OMG indeed.