After Vodafone UK announced this week it reached 100,000 LTE subscribers since August, Telenor has also revealed that it now has 400,000 LTE customers on its network since launching the service a year ago.
"One year after the launch of 4G, we can see that the timing was right," Telenor Norway CEO Berit Svendsen said in a statement. "Now the needs of customers, the features of mobile phones, and the speeds of the mobile network are all on the same team."
The Norwegian operator said surveys also indicate that LTE provides a significantly better experience for users than 3G. "A 4G customer downloads three to five times more megabytes using their mobile on a monthly basis than a 3G user, so there's no doubt that people are enjoying the speed," added Svendsen.
A Telenor survey asked its customers whether they experienced high speeds when using the Internet on their mobile phones. Three out of four who were using LTE mobiles on Telenor's LTE network thought that the speeds were high, and 36 per cent of these people thought that the speeds were very high, the operator said.
Telenor now has more than 45 per cent LTE coverage in Norway and said this will increase to 50 per cent by the end of the year. Its target is to provide LTE coverage to nine out of 10 Norwegian households by 2015.
"This year we are bringing into operation 2,000 new base stations on the 3G and 4G network--the rate is 12 new base stations per day," said Svendsen.
Oslo and Stockholm became the first cities in the world to get commercial LTE services following TeliaSonera's launch in December 2009. Norway is now awaiting the allocation of spectrum in the 800 MHz, 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands, with the auction expected to take place in December.
For more:
- see this Telenor release
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