First LTE phone coming to Vodafone Germany

The Htc Velocity Will Be The First Lte Handset Available In Europe And Available On Vodafone Germany

Vodafone D2, the German arm of the UK-based carrier, has revealed that it will soon have an LTE ready smartphone from Taiwanese handset maker HTC available on its network. German publication Computer Week has said that the Vodafone press office in Germany has confirmed that the HTC Velocity 4G will soon be coming to market, though the exact launch date and pricing has not been confirmed.

The HTC Velocity 4G is powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm chipset and will run Android 2.3. A Velocity supporting 1800MHz LTE is already available in Australia and the handset had already appeared on the AT&T 700MHz LTE network as the Vivid. This version is being brought to market for Vodafone Germany to support its 800MHz and 2600MHz LTE network.

The device will offer download speeds of up to 100Mbps and upload speed of 50Mbps and 42.2Mbps HSPA+ is also supported. As VoLTE has yet to be implemented, calls will be routed over the 3G network via circuit-switched fall-back.

Vodafone Germany launched its LTE network in December 2010 and so far its customers have been limited to USB dongles and Mifi devices to make use of it. The Velocity becomes the second LTE phone to be available in Europe, with Telia in Sweden recently offering the Samsung Galaxy SII LTE. Other than this, the only LTE-ready handsets have so far only been available on US networks such as Verizon and AT&T.

HTC will be hoping that LTE will help it gain ground in Europe after poor fourth-quarterly 2011 results and low forecasts for the first quarter of 2012 cent earlier this week caused its share price to drop by 6 per cent.

Vodafone Germany will be speaking at the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your interest.