First Commercial LTE Network Goes Live

(Business News & Technology News, 15 Dec 2009)

With less than three weeks left in the year, TeliaSonera moved up its first quarter 2010 plans to December 2009 and this morning announced the commercial launch of its LTE network in central parts of two cities - Stockholm and Oslo. The base stations are being provided by Ericsson (Stockholm) and Huawei (Oslo). This likely means just a small handful of base stations have been deployed to cover a total of about 450,000 people. Three large cities in Norway and 25 cities in Sweden will be deployed in 2010. Denmark is a possibility for launches in 2010 as well. 2010 CAPEX is expected to be around US$ 70 million for TeliaSonera's LTE rollout.

A limited quantity of LTE USB modems from Samsung will be available tomorrow. These modems will not be multimode 2G/3G/4G modems—they will only have LTE and will only support the 2.6GHz band. LTE is not backwards-compatible with 2G and 3G. A separate 3G modem will be available at no extra cost. Multimode modems will be available during the second quarter of 2010. Most LTE chipsets for modems will not be ready until next year, so the LTE chipset is likely Samsung's own.

The service speed is cited as 20Mbps to 80Mbps, but it remains to be seen what the true average speeds per user will be on a loaded network. TeliaSonera's network is using 20MHz channels, which will help it achieve at least the lower end of the cited speed range. Service pricing will be at around $84 per month with a 30GB cap—intended to be higher than 3G pricing—but will start with an introductory price of about $0.56 per month with no monthly usage cap until July 2010.

"TeliaSonera's launch is a significant milestone for LTE networks since it's the first," said Philip Solis, practice director at ABI Research. "Today, commercially launched LTE networks now cover fewer than half a million people. This is very tiny today, but we expect that to increase significantly by the end of next year with other early LTE rollouts."

ABI Research