Mobile operator Everything Everywhere ( Orange and T-Mobile ) has joined forces with BT to launch a new trial of next generation Long Term Evolution ( LTE ) Mobile Broadband technology in South Newquay (Cornwall) UK. The service could one day deliver peak download speeds of up to 1Gbps, at which point it would become a true 4th Generation (4G) mobile technology.

The trial itself, which is focused on rural areas, will run from September 2011 to early 2012 and make use of the 800MHz radio spectrum frequency. The 800MHz band (790-862MHz) is currently being used for old analogue television services, although the Digital Switchover to digital terrestrial TV has allowed 800MHz to be freed up (Digital Dividend) for use by Mobile Broadband services.


Interested residents can get involved by going here - http://4gwirelessbroadbandtrial.co.uk. Nokia, Siemens, Huawei and the Cornwall Development Company (CDC) are all helping to support the trial. Ofcom is expected to complete its auction of compatible national 800MHz and 2.6GHz radio spectrum by the end of 2013, although new regulatory proposals from Europe could allow LTE to be deployed much sooner by using the existing 900MHz band.

This is certainly not the country's first LTE trial. O2 and a number of smaller projects have been running similar trials since the end of 2009. However, due to the shared nature of such technology, the real world performance gain from LTE is likely to be far lower than its top (peak) speed.

The partnership noted that its initial LTE service had achieved download speeds of 100Mbps to 150Mbps in lab tests, although real-world performance of 10Mbps to 30Mbps is far more likely. Incidentally a rival mobile operator, Three (3) UK, this week predicted that average mobile internet speeds should reach 10Mbps in 5 years time, but only for certain parts of the country.