TeliaSonera, which was the first operator in the world to launch a commercial LTE network, has now turned on LTE in Sweden’s second largest city, Gothenburg, and say that thanks to equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks they’re averaging 85 to 90 Mbps download speeds and even hitting peaks of 100 Mbps. Upload speeds faired just as well, maxing out at around 30 Mbps. When you compare these figures to the benchmarks performed soon after the network was launched in Stockholm and Norway last December, it looks like they’ve ironed out several kinks.
Over on the other side of the pond, Americans are still waiting for either Verizon or MetroPCS to launch their respective LTE networks. While MetroPCS hasn’t commented on the speeds they plan on offering customers, they have announced a device that’s already been leaked across the internet. Verizon on the other hand is telling folks that they should expect between 5 and 12 Mbps, which is a far cry from what they’re doing in IKEA-land. Even Clearwire, who is currently a WiMAX operator, has said that they hope to achieve somewhere between 20 and 70 Mbps during their LTE trials, sceduled to take place later this year.
Just remember that LTE is still a very immature technology. When TeliaSonera launched their network they only had one LTE to sell, and it was a Samsung USB dongle that couldn’t even access the already existing 3G and 2G networks. When you left an LTE area, you had no internet. Simple as that. Earlier this year when TeliaSonera got some dual mode dongles from Samsung they upgraded their customers for free, which is a nice touch, but again, don’t expect mobile phones to be taking advantage of LTE for quite a long time.
The technology was built to handle only data, so operators are scratching their heads wondering how they’ll make voice and SMS work. There are plenty of proposals, and almost everyone has said they plan on supporting the “One Voice Initiative“, but no one has gone live with that technology yet.