The EU announced yesterday an 18 million euro (US$25 million) investment in an “ultra high-speed” Internet system to underpin the next generation of mobile services.
“Europe’s research know-how will continue to set the tone for the development of mobile services and devices around the globe, just as we did in the past decades with the GSM standard,” EU Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding said.
The funding will be released on Jan. 1 for research on what is known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced technology, the high end of the fourth generation of mobile technology which should offer users “mobile internet speeds up to a hundred times faster than current 3G networks,” the European Commission said.
The new LTE technology, not the advanced version which the EU will fund, is being tested by mobile operators in Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK and is expected to be commercially available in Sweden and Norway in the first half of next year.
SPEED
That will provide mobile internet speeds of up to 100Mb per second, 10 times faster than the 3G mobile networks.
“LTE technologies will turn mobile phones into powerful mobile computers. Millions of new users will get ultra high-speed internet access on their portable devices, wherever they are,” Reding enthused.
LTE Advanced said it would provide lower prices and mobile broadband speeds up to 1Gb gigabit per second.
This would allow excellent mobile access to televisions and video-on-demand systems for example.
Between 2004 and 2007, the EU gave 25 million euros to LTE development, leading to the first blueprint for an LTE-based network infrastructure.
The 18 million euros will go to the enhanced version, LTE Advanced.
CONSORTIA
Next month the commission will open negotiations on the details with project consortia, including the flagship ARTIST4G which united 4G industry and researchers from the UK, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden.
The new projects are expected to begin in January.
SPECTRUM
LTE uses radio spectrum more efficiently, enabling mobile networks to benefit from the “digital dividend” and use frequencies freed by the switchover from analogue to digital TV.
Overall, between 2007 and 2013 the EU will invest more than 700 million euros on researching future networks.
Leading mobile operators and manufacturers around the world such as Orange, T-Mobile, Ericsson, and Nokia have already committed to using the LTE standard. By 2013, operators worldwide are expected to invest nearly 6 billion euros in LTE equipment, market analysts said.
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