Telefonica surprises with six-country LTE trial

Telefonica made a surprise announcement, revealing big plans for widespread Long Term Evolution (LTE) trial project that will include six countries in Europe and Latin America--the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Argentina and Brazil.

The Spanish operator invited a slew of major infrastructure vendors to be a part of the six-month trials. Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks, and ZTE have been selected so far, but it appears more will join the fold. Motorola will likely be one of them. 

Interestingly, Latin America has been considered to be a laggard country when it comes to LTE, and Telefonica has made no commitment to a commercial launch date of LTE. Telefonica said its rollout of LTE will depend on the "availability of equipment to customers (data cards and later on, telephones)" and the "spectrum required to be able to provide services."

For more:
- check out Unstrung [1]

Related articles:
LTE: T-Mobile Austria tests with 60 base stations [2], as Ericsson eyes Nortel patents
LTE: Vodafone links with Huawei for LTE tests [3]
Twelve operators commit to LTE deployment [4] in 2010