World's first commercial LTE service launched

Stuart Corner
Monday, 14 December 2009 10:30

Business IT - Technology

TeliaSonera has become the first mobile operator in the world to offer a commercial LTE service, announcing an earlier than expected turn-on of LTE in Stockholm and Oslo on networks supplied, respectively by Ericsson and Huawei.

The telco announced in January this year that it had awarded contracts to Ericsson for its LTE network in Stockholm and to Huawei for Oslo. However scheduled launch date was then given as being 2010.

At that time TeliaSonera's wider LTE business was still up for grabs. Lars Klasson, senior vice president and CTO, mobility services, TeliaSonera, said: "We have chosen Ericsson to deliver the initial [LTE] city network in Stockholm and Huawei for the initial [LTE] city network in Oslo. Now, TeliaSonera continues the evaluation of suppliers to deliver [LTE] networks in the Nordic and Baltic countries." No further contracts have yet been announced.

According to Ericsson, "Downtown Stockholm is completely covered with the Ericsson LTE network, making it the largest LTE deployment to date. TeliaSonera's subscribers are the first to have access to the LTE service by commercially available Samsung LTE dongles."

TeliaSonera announced in October that it had signed a contract with Samsung for the supply of these devices. It said that, on LTE networks they would deliver bandwidths about 10 times greater than those presently available on its mobile networks. According to Huawei's press release, "The [LTE] services at launch offer maximum speed of up to 100Mbps, which is about 10 times faster than existing 3G networks."

However Verizon Wireless in the US is promising speeds in practice of between 5 and 12Mbps when it launches its network next year and, according to Ericsson with the optimal spectrum for LTE (20MHz contiguous for each of transmit and receive) bandwidths in practice should be about twice what Verizon is quoting. Details of TeliaSonera's spectrum were not available.

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