LIVE FROM LONDON PRESS EVENT: UK 4G player EE said it will double the speed and capacity of its LTE network “this summer” in 10 cities, promising to deliver average speeds to consumers of more than 20Mb/s.

At an event in London this morning, Olaf Swantee, the company’s CEO, also revealed its subscriber targets for the first time: 1 million users by the end of 2013 – after 14 months of operation.

This is equivalent to around 8 per cent of the company’s contract subscriber base.

The executive highlighted that the company’s 4G user base is growing 10 per cent week-on-week, with one-in-four consumers and SME customers signing up where it is available. He also noted a 10 per cent uplift in average revenue per user (ARPU) when customers migrate to these services.

In order to deliver its speed and capacity boost, the operator is doubling the amount of 1800MHz spectrum it has dedicated to 4G, to 20MHz from 10MHz. Among the developments it noted was the drop-off in demand from 2G-only devices using these frequencies, as consumers have shifted to 3G.

And the executive was confident on EE’s ability to maintain its leadership in the UK 4G market, even as the launch of competing services from other operators nears.

“One of the reasons we can confidently talk about our roadmaps today, and that we didn’t in the beginning of this year or at the end of last year, is because we are after the spectrum auction. We have secured, in total now, 36 per cent of the airwaves in the UK,” Swantee said

“In fact we have so much spectrum that we could carry every mobile user in the UK and deliver a solid voice, text and data service to those customers,” he continued.

The company said that through its advantageous spectrum position, it will be able to deliver “more 4G bandwidth than any other operator in the UK is able to, now and in the future”.

“We are setting a roadmap, an evolution of 4G, which others cannot match. There are other players here in the UK that do not have the spectrum capacity to deliver this capability today, or in the future”, Swantee observed.

The initial markets set to benefit from EE’s new 4G regime are Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield, with pilots in Cardiff seeing “headline speeds reach 80Mb/s plus”.

Looking forward, the company also said that by the end of 2013 it is aiming to trial carrier aggregation, a “fundamental feature of LTE-Advanced”.

EE last week said that it had reached 50 per cent population coverage in the UK, which is expected to increase to 55 per cent by June 2013.

“This is one of the fastest rollouts in the world, and certainly the fastest rollout in the UK, of any mobile network technology”, Swantee said.

EE did not use today’s event to provide any updates on its customer propositions, which have come in for criticism due to the paucity of its data bundles. “We are continuing to monitor the feedback from our customers on tariffs and propositions,” the executive concluded.