EU announces massive investment into LTE research & development

Tuesday 18 August 2009   |  Comment  |  

The European Union has today announced an 18 million euro (15.5 million pound) investment in research into LTE.

LTE - or Long Term Evolution - is one of the standards which may be adopted as the next generation of mobile broadband technology, enabling mobile broadband connections at speeds tens of times faster than those we currently experience.

There are versions of LTE being trialled in various places throughout Europe, and the first commercially viable LTE networks are expected to be available during the course of next year, but the new EU funding, which will be released on 1st January next year, will go into research on the enhanced version of LTE, LTE Advanced.

It was Europe's joint research, its single market and EU investment which saw the GSM standard widely adopted to create the majority of the mobile networks we see today. This investment into LTE promises to have a similar effect on the new technology, with the EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding commenting: "Europe's research know-how will continue to set the tone for the development of mobile services and devices around the globe, just as we did in the past decades with the GSM standard." 

The EU sees the advantages of LTE as including:

  • Boosting network capacities, enabling faster connections at lower prices
  • Increasing speeds up to 1 gigabit per second, allowing video and tv streaming over mobile broadband connections
  • Better utitlising spectrum & improving reach of signals, to reach broadband 'notspots'

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