Bouygues Telecom – France’s third-largest mobile operator – is to trial LTE technology next year using equipment from Alcatel-Lucent at a number of sites in western France. The deal takes Alcatel-Lucent’s tally of LTE operator trials to 19 to date, including Telefonica, Etisalat, SingTel, China Mobile and Verizon Wireless (with whom it has scored a commercial deployment win).

The industry’s top network vendors – Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Motorola, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks and ZTE – are enjoying early operator success with LTE trials, before lucrative commercial deals are awarded. Yesterday Mobile Business Briefing reported that Verizon Wireless – expected to be one of the first operators worldwide to launch commercial LTE networks – believes the technology will offer average downlink rates of 5-12 Mb/s. The GSMA claims that 50 mobile operators worldwide have already committed to LTE plans, trials or deployments.