Thanks to (Deutsche) Telekom in Germany we had a nice hands-on with the first LTE service here in Koeln (Cologne.) At 80 euro per month this is clearly a premium service but if you can justify it in and around Koeln, its a super high speed service. We measured 45Mbps this evening!
This is obviously the first phase; more devices and tariff options will feed in and it goes hand-in-hand with rollouts from other service providers and in other European countries which we’ll be happy to test and happy to see competition from.
Just one point of note here, the service is currently offered via a USB stick only. As we looked across our table we counted 12 devices. Only two of them were PC’s capable of taking a USB stick!
Where is the story?
Agreed. Not a huge story for anyone outside Germany but likewise, sometimes the US-focused news about LTE launches in the US aren’t interesting for the EU readers!
Being someone located in Germany I’m interested to follow this and I hope others are too. 8% of our readers are from Germany so say ‘Hallo’ ;-)
Chippy.
Hallo
So far our LTE launches aren’t anywhere near as fast as yours.
The download is even faster than my fiber internet connection.
Is this LTE primarily for phones?
How much will it cost?
Thanks
This is primarily for pcs that can use a usb stick. Data only. There weren’t any announcements about tablets or phones. Maybe 2012 for the first of those. It looks like lte will take 3-4 years before it becomes as cheap as 3g is now. Interestingly, this company also committed to do another upgrade of hsdpa technology to 45Mbps (theoretical) Personally id rather pay extra for better 2Mbps coverage than higher speeds!