Ericsson says it will deliver the world's first end-to-end mobile LTE phone call during the Barcelona Mobile World Congress this week.
The demonstration call will be made using handheld mobile devices developed by Ericsson Mobile Platforms. Ericsson's LTE network equipment supports multi-user data rates of up to 160Mbps per call, the company said in a statement.
The evolving technology - which Ericsson calls Long-Term Evolution - System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE) - is the prime candidate from the W-CDMA 3G camp, 3GPP, to be recognized as an official "4G" standard.
Robert Puskaric, head of Ericsson's mobile platforms business, says Ericsson's LTE/SAE today enables uplink and downlink data speeds of 25Mbit/s.
Commercial launch of LTE is likely in 2009, says Ericsson, with samples of its first LTE handset platform available later in 2008.