Two major European-based mobile operators today announced high-profile plans to upgrade their networks, with Vodafone eyeing commercial rollout of HSPA+ and TeliaSonera prepping a commercial launch of LTE in the cities of Stockholm and Oslo next year. Vodafone said it has successfully achieved ‘actual’ peak data download rates of up to 16Mb/s in a Spanish trial using HSPA+ technology supplied by Ericsson and Qualcomm. The operator now plans to trial HSPA+ technology with peak data download rates of up to 21Mb/s “early in 2009,” and is confident that these trials will offer download speeds of “more than 13Mb/s in good conditions and an average of more than 4Mb/s across a full range of typical cell locations including urban environments.” Vodafone said that if the trials prove a success, the operator “plans to make this technology available in selected commercial networks.” At present, Vodafone’s HSPA network offers peak download rates of 7.2Mb/s. Vodafone follows operators such as 3, Telecom Italia, StarHub and Telstra in planning to deploy HSPA+.

Meanwhile, Scandinavian operator TeliaSonera has announced plans to commercially deploy LTE technology in 2010. Ericsson will supply kit for the launch in Stockholm, Sweden, whilst Huawei will provide kit for the launch in Oslo, Norway. In a statement, the operator claimed the deals represent the “world’s first 4G commercial contracts.” Certainly such deployments will be one of the world’s first commercial activations of LTE, although US operator Verizon has publicly announced ambitions to launch LTE in 2009, with operators such as NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile also preparing rollout. A member of the GSM family of technologies, LTE is being deployed by mobile operators looking to launch ‘next-generation’ mobile services beyond HSPA. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) recently agreed on an initial set of specifications for LTE, to be included in the 3GPP’s new Release 8 set of standards.