Northern Europe is where all the advanced evolution of telecommunications takes place. I have a theory on this, and it isn’t because Ericsson is Swedish, but it’s because the weather is absolutely terrible for half the year so therefore one must invest in having the best download speeds possible, to pirate all those movies you’d like to see in the theatre or rent from Blockbuster, but don’t want to bother with having to put on ski pants and three layers of sweaters.
With that being said, TDC, the former telecom monopoly in Denmark, has just said that pending their acquisition of a licence from the government, they’ll be able to turn on their LTE network as soon as June. Not all of Denmark will get LTE however. Similar to how TeliaSonera in Sweden launched LTE in Stockholm back in December 2009, and is only now bringing the technology to the rest of the nation, TDC is going to be offering LTE to Copenhagen and Aarhus and then going to all the other densely populated cities.
Theoretically speaking, the LTE equipment that TDC is purchasing can deliver up to 150 Mbps, but they say customers should expect about 15 Mbps, and all the other benefits LTE brings such as low latency and respect among your fellow geeks. Current TDC customers need not be left in the dust of LTE, plans are underway to upgrade the current 7.2 Mbps HSPA network to 21 Mbps HSPA+ in 6 cities by the end of May, and then all major cities by the end of 2010.
How will they price their LTE? Which modems will they offer customers? What restrictions, in terms of GB per customer per month, will be put in place? These are questions we don’t have the answers too, but are very interested in finding.
June is coming pretty fast.