The European Union said Tuesday it will invest $25 million into research that will underpin the next generation of 4G mobile networks.
The EU says the funding will go towards research on Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced technology, that will offer mobile Internet speeds up to a hundred times faster than current 3G networks. The funding will be released on January 1, 2010.
“With LTE technologies, 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,” said Viviane Reding, the EU’s Commissioner for Telecoms and Media.
Viviane Reding
European Commission
“LTE technologies will turn mobile phones into powerful mobile computers. Millions of new users will get ultra high-speed Internet access on their portable devices, wherever they are. This will create tremendous opportunities and plenty of space for growing the digital economy.”
LTE is currently being trailed by mobile operators in Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. and is set to be commercially available in Sweden and Norway in the first half of 2010.
LTE uses radio spectrum more efficiently, enabling mobile networks to benefit from the “digital dividend” and use the frequencies freed by the switchover from analogue to digital TV.
Mobile operators and manufacturers including Orange, TeliSonera, T-Mobile, AT&T, NTT-DoCoMO, Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks have already committed to using the LTE standard.
