O2 Germany will launch commercial LTE services on July 1^st this year. The announcement, which was made at a CeBIT press conference  yesterday, was sketchy on details regarding speed and pricing. The new network will reportedly offer speeds in line with an “average DSL connection” and run on Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei kit.

O2 will deploy the network on both the 800Mhz and 2.6GHz frequencies. At last year’s German spectrum auction, spectrum in the 800MHz band attracted some of the highest bids, not least because of its suitability for LTE deployments. Germany’s 800MHz “digital dividend” spectrum was granted to O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone last year on condition that it first be used to service rural areas that are under-served by fixed broadband.

Vodafone rolled out its LTE network in Germany in December 2010 while incumbent operator Deutsche Telekom announced earlier this week that it would begin LTE trials with business customers towards the middle of this year.

The seventh annual LTE World Summit takes place in Amsterdam on 17th – 18th May.

www.lteconference.com<http://www.lteconference.com/>