EE has announced a three-year, £1.5 billion network investment plan, under which the operator plans to extend its geographical coverage across the UK, including in badly or not at all connected rural areas, as well as continuing rolling out 4G with an aim for it to take over 2G by 2017.
EE has announced its 4G customer base has reached 7.7 million, up from 5.7 million since the start of last year. The UK operator claimed this sets a new European record for 4G growth.
EE has launched LTE-Advanced, which it is branding ‘4G+’, at some 150 sites across London, declaring the UK has “gone from a laggard back to being a leader.” As reported previously by Telecoms.com, the new faster speeds are facilitated by carrier aggregation (CA) over the combination of 20MHz of 1800MHz and 20MHzof 2.6GHz spectrum.
South Korean carrier SK Telecom claims to have broken mobile download speed records again using carrier aggregation technologies in partnership with infrastructure supplier Nokia. By converging both FDD and TDD spectrum the operator was able to demonstrate throughput of 3.78Gbps, downloading a 5GB HD movie in just 11 seconds.
US mobile network Sprint has extended its LTE coverage to 20 new markets, taking the total number of cities in which the service is available to 402, the firm said. It also introduced its Spark service, which takes advantage of LTE-Advanced techniques including carrier aggregation, in two new markets. Sprint said that it expects to have LTE coverage of more than 250 million people by the mid point of 2014.
South Korean operator SK Telecom has launched what it says is the world’s first commercially available LTE-Advanced service. The operator said it is offering LTE-Advanced at standard LTE prices.
The ability to deliver a superior experience for mobile video will be key to Clearwire’s success, its CTO John Saw has said. Speaking at the LTE North America conference, Saw described video as “the closest thing for a potential killer app for 4G”, due to viewing via LTE being quantitatively better than 3G.
US satellite pay TV broadcaster Dish networks has applied for the trademark ‘Ollo’ as a brand name for its planned wireless LTE-Advanced based services.
AT&T, the US operator, will introduce LTE Advanced in 2013, according to AT&T Labs president and chief executive, Krish Prabhu. Prabhu made the revelation earlier this week at the LTE North America conference, held in Dallas, Texas, the home city of the US carrier. However, no further details were announced by the company.
While many countries LTE plans are still at the drawing board stage the ever eager Swedish are already getting a taste of its successor, LTE Advanced. This week Ericsson demonstrated LTE Advanced running over a test network in Kista, Sweden.
Rohde & Schwarz, a supplier of test and measurement solutions, and Synopsys, which owns telecoms IP and libraries, have announced a collaboration that should accelerate the design and verification of LTE-related equipment.
Japan’s leading carrier, NTT DoCoMo, said Monday that it is gearing up to test LTE Advanced with an eye to racking up speeds of 1Gbps on the downlink.
