First Ever Live Trial of LTE (4G) In The UK

The UK’s first trial of LTE (4G) will be occurring in Cornwall, South West England and telecoms giants BT Wholesale and Everything Everywhere (T-mobile and Orange) will be running the tests. They are running a proof of concept trial which is designed to see what mobile broadband speeds are available within the field and this is to involve 100 mobile and 100 fixed line users.

The CEO of Everything Everywhere, Tom Alexander said “We strongly believe that, by sharing our network and mobile assets in this way, we can make a valuable contribution to the economics of rural broadband services. Our work with BT is providing a test bed for new technologies such as 4G LTE which, with the correct allocation of sub 1GHz spectrum from the Government, has the potential to make a real impact on the way in which we communicate in the future.”

Sally Davis, the CEO of BT Wholesale stated “This is a great mixed economy example of innovation and collaboration by two organisations pushing the boundaries of technology for the benefit of customers. The expectation of what we will learn is truly exciting, as much for the customers who are unable to get a broadband service in a number of rural communities across the country.”

The partial reason for the remote location is to see how LTE can help to bring fixed line broadband to rural areas, where the construction fibre networks is not financially or economically feasable. These trials may help to speed up the introduction of LTE nationwide. America already has this service nationwide and has done for some time. With any luck we will too.