In what is building up to be a race, the Swedish operator, TeliaSonera, and Ericsson have cheekily announced the first commercial LTE network--albeit that it has no subscribers or services, and involves a single base station at present.
However, this lonely LTE site in Stockholm is the starting point for TeliaSonera's fully commercial network scheduled to provide LTE coverage for Sweden's capital city starting next year. But Ulf Ewaldsson, VP and head of product area radio at Ericsson, was keen to express his confidence in this move and that Ericsson was leading the charge: "The unveiling of this site shows that LTE is no longer the story of the future; it is the story of today."
TeliaSonera earlier this year said Ericsson and Huawei were its preferred providers for its initial commercial LTE contracts. The Scandinavian operator plans to roll out LTE services in Sweden and Norway, with Ericsson in charge of deploying the network in Stockholm and Huawei responsible for building the LTE network in Oslo, Norway.
While neither TeliaSonera nor Ericsson would comment on the performance of the new network, reports indicated the operator aimed to provide data transfer rates around 10x faster than existing mobile broadband networks, and that complete LTE coverage of Stockholm could be achieved within months.
For more on this story:
EE Times and Telegeography
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