Posted: 18th Sep, 2009 By: MarkJ
Mobile phone manufacture Nokia has claimed the world’s first official call made on a next generation 4G LTE network yesterday. The call used a real base station and standards-compliant software. With all the talk about Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology being the next generation of Mobile Broadband , offering download speeds of up to and beyond 150Mbps , it can be easy to forget that LTE will handle voice traffic too.
Nokia's Blog:
Nokia Siemens Networks were the ones to demonstrate this latest development and needless to say, they’re pretty pleased with it. NSN’s Mark Rouanne said “this call is a significant landmark in building and strengthening our entire LTE ecosystem”. We should expect to see commercial networks rolling out LTE services in the next 12 months or so.
This isn’t the first, first, for a Nokia company though. The first GSM call was made on a Nokia car phone, on a Nokia network in 1991. In 2001 Nokia made the world’s first 3G voice call on a commercial 3GPP system. And now, in 2009, comes the first 4G call.
We are currently working on a special interview with Ericsson about what LTE will mean for UK consumers and hope to have that complete for October, so keep an eye out.