TeliaSonera rolls out commercial LTE services at rock-bottom prices

TeliaSonera AB, which handed out the industry's first LTE contracts in January to Ericsson and Huawei, has lit up its LTE networks in Norway and Sweden, becoming the world's first operator to commercially launch LTE services.

Customers are able to purchase Samsung LTE-only modems for use on TeliaSonera's limited LTE networks built by Huawei in Oslo and Ericsson in Stockholm. The LTE networks cover the central areas of these cities, which translates into about 150,000 people in Oslo and about 300,000 potential subscribers in Stockholm.

Users can expect to experience data network speeds of between 20Mbit/s and 80Mbit/s, a TeliaSonera spokesman told Unstrung.

Given the limited coverage and the fact that users must also carry a 3G connection devices when out of the LTE coverage area, subscribers in Stockholm will pay the rock-bottom price of 4 Swedish Kroner, or 56 cents per month for the next six months, while TeliaSonera subscribers will pay 1 Norwegian Kroner, or 17 cents per month until April 1, presumably when the operator offers better coverage. The operator wants to get a grasp on what consumers think of the service.

TeliaSonera plans to significantly increase the tariff in Sweden to about $84 per month. In Norway, the fee will jump to $120 per month. Interestingly, TeliaSonera will impose a data cap in both markets of 30 gigabytes.

TeliaSonera plans to roll out the LTE network to 25 cities and vacation areas in Sweden as well as three big Norwegian cities throughout 2010. The company also declared its intention to go live with LTE in Finland next year, and said that an LTE spectrum auction in Denmark is anticipated to take place in the first quarter of next year.

For more:
- see this Unstrung article [1]
- read this other Unstrung article [2]

Related articles:
TeliaSonera hands out industry's first commercial LTE contracts [3]
TeliaSonera secures LTE modems for 2010 launch [4]
LTE goes 'commercial', claim TeliaSonera and Ericsson [5]