Nokia Siemens claims world's first LTE call

 

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By Stuart Turton and Reuters

Posted on 18 Sep 2009 at 10:57

Nokia Siemens Networks claims to have made the world's first call using the next-generation LTE mobile technology.

The call was made at the company's research and development site in Ulm, Germany, using a commercial base station and fully standard-compliant software, according to Nokia Siemens.

"It's a proofpoint of the direction we are going to. Our strategy is focused on deployments and being first to the mass market," says Marc Rouanne, the head of radio networks unit at Nokia Siemens.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the successor to current 3G technologies, and is theoretically capable of download speeds of 150Mbits/sec. The first LTE services will be opened later this year, with mass deployments in 2010, the company says.

The world's telecom carriers are lining up infrastructure vendors as they prepare to launch LTE technology, which will enable faster uploads and downloads of movies, music and other data to mobile devices.

"Wherever we have deployed LTE-capable base stations it gives us an edge to quickly multiply and deploy LTE networks," he said.

Nokia Siemens is racing Ericsson to bring LTE to market, however, the latter has claimed that the UK could be waiting some time for the technology.