Mobile operators in Germany have expanded LTE coverage to reach 13 million households across the country, according to a report from German ICT trade group Bitkom.
Having installed around 3,000 new base stations to support the technology, mobile operators now consider the coverage of rural areas to be complete and are now actively planning the deployment of LTE services across 300 German cities by the end of this year, according to the study.
"The expansion of LTE services in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt Main, Munich and Berlin is already underway," Bitkom President Dieter Kempf said in a statement, adding that by the end of 2012 more than 50 per cent of German households will have access to LTE.
Bitkom said that for operators to meet their LTE licensing conditions they were first required to deploy the technology across rural areas that had no access to broadband services.
Commenting on the progress of LTE deployment, Kempf said that the €4.4 billion spent by operators acquiring their LTE licences, in comparison to the €51 billion spent on 3G licences, has enabled these companies to make greater investments in upgrading their existing networks. Bitkom believes that LTE Advanced, which will only require a software update to the base stations, could become available in the next four to five years, offering theoretical peak speeds of up to 1Gbps
For more:
- see this Bitkom release (translated via Google Translate)
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