In the past I've reported on activities in 3GPP on Evolved EDGE (here and here). Looks like standards are well on their way now and a number of network vendors and terminal manufacturers are working on the implementation.
According to analyst resources, especially China and India could be countries in which operators are interested in the new features, especially in the dual carrier functionality that promises to further increase data rates per device. In these countries, no or only little 3G has been deployed to date so it might well happen that operators in these countries will go directly to LTE, WiMAX and beyond and try to fill the gap in the meantime by evolving their GSM networks.
What I am wondering though is if networks in these countries really have enough capacity to assign timeslots on several carriers to a single mobile device? I would assume their network density and capacity is pretty well adapted to current traffic levels which doesn't leave much room for this. When looking at it from a different perspective the question is if they would be prepared to increase capacity (and thus CAPEX and OPEX) in their networks for the dual carrier feature?
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