The world's first radio base station in a commercial 4G network has been deployed in Stockholm, the Swedish national telecommunications operator TeliaSonera has announced.
Telia said Monday that it has connected the 4G base station to its IP network and to a test network belonging to Swedish telecom vendor Ericsson. However, the commercial launch of the network is not expected until 2010, when modems will be available.
Expected speeds are "10 times faster than the speeds customers enjoy today with mobile broadband in 3G networks," Telia said.
That would mean between 60 megabits and 100 megabits per second, given that today's 3G networks with HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) technology can attain 6Mbps to 10Mbps, depending on the version deployed.
Telia is among a handful of mobile operators worldwide that are building next-generation networks for mobile broadband using 4G or LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology. The largest is Verizon, which has been described as a world leader in the area by Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg. "The U.S. is back in the driver's seat, and Verizon has taken the lead in rolling out LTE," Svanberg said in an interview recently.
One reason why Verizon is aggressively planning for a 4G network is that its 3G network, based on EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) technology, doesn't match the speeds possible in HSPA networks belonging to the GSM/WCDMA family, used by operators such as Telia and AT&T. (GSM stands for Global System for Mobile Communications, while WCDMA is short for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access.)
Verizon has announced the same time frame, a 2010 launch, for its 4G network. The company expects to cover 25 to 30 markets in the first year, and to blanket the continental U.S. and Hawaii by 2015.
In the UK, Motorola has launched trials of its own LTE technology in Swindon, and T-Mobile has outlined its own plans for 4G testing. However, Ericsson has predicted that an LTE rollout is unlikely to arrive in the UK until the end of next year at the earliest.
The Norwegian incumbent Telenor, which intends to introduce a Swedish 4G network that will compete with Telia's, has been criticized for running advertisements that promise indoor coverage for 99 percent of the Swedish population at 80Mbps to 150Mbps.
Though 3G coverage has reached this level of penetration in Sweden, Telenor's promise is "completely unrealistic," Jens Zander, a professor in radio technology, said recently in an interview with Swedish technology weekly Ny Teknik.
The advertisements by Telenor were published just weeks before mobile operators in Sweden agreed on using realistic maximum speeds of mobile broadband in their marketing, as opposed to the theoretical maximum speeds often used. The agreement was reached after the governmental agency for consumers rights threatened operators with heavy fines for misleading marketing.
Some telecommunications consulting firms have criticized the 4G deployment and the whole 4G concept. "The weakness of the telecom industry is that when it's time to harvest the success of its investments, it rushes into new technology," Bengt Nordström, CEO and founder of Swedish firm Northstream, told Ny Teknik. He pointed out that both 2G and 3G technology matured four to five years after their initial launches.
Although LTE involves new radio networks with different technology, the Danish analyst firm Strand Consult says that the 4G concept is a media invention, as LTE technology is part of the 3G standard IMT-2000. "We know for a fact that customers that purchase mobile broadband are not asking for 1G, 2G, 3G, or 4G, they are asking and paying for the possibility of getting online and using the available services," Strand Consultant said in a report.
Karen Friar of ZDNet UK contributed to this story.
