The first commercial 4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile network is to be built in Norway.
Operator TeliaSonera has place the first commercial 4G LTE network contract with Huawei Technologies.
“Our customers will enjoy 4G with high-speed and high-quality mobility communications already in 2010,” said Lars Klasson, senior v-p and CTO at TeliaSonera.
This is an important landmark for the high speed mobile phone technology which is vying with Wimax to be the leading broadband mobile phone technology for 2010 and behind.
The current generation HSPA and HSPA+ 3G technologies will provide the lion share of broadband services in the short term that is for the next five years. So it will be logical for the market to then jump straight to full-blown LTE with its promise of 300Mbit/s data rates.
It is possible that Wimax, which has struggled to gain any serious market momentum, will be squeezed as next generation mobile technologies such as HSPA and LTE dominate the market.
A boom in the up take of wireless broadband services over the next few years could result in as many as 2.1 billion wireless broadband customers generating $784bn in service revenues by 2015.
Huawei is providing LTE basestations, core network and OSS (Operating Support System) covering Oslo.
See Qualcomm switches to LTE - is this the end of Wimax?