The European Commission said today it plans to fund research into LTE Advanced technology, a future enhancement of the forthcoming LTE network standard. The Commission will invest €18 million in an LTE Advanced research project starting 1 January 2010 and will provide further details next month. The new project will build on the Commission’s earlier initiatives to define the LTE-based network infrastructure, which took place between 2004 and 2007. These initial projects – known as the ‘Wireless World Initiative New Radio’ (WINNER I and II) projects – involved a consortium of 41 leading European companies and universities and was funded by the Commission to the tune of EUR25 million. The new LTE Advanced project, which will build on these earlier efforts, aims to unite industry players and researchers from Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. “With LTE technologies, Europe’s research ‘know-how’ will continue to set the tone for the development of mobile services and devices around the globe, just as we did in the past decades with the GSM standard,” said Viviane Reding, the EU’s Commissioner for Telecoms and Media.

In a statement, the Commission said that the LTE Advanced standard would raise mobile broadband speeds to a theoretical peak of 1Gb/s, enabling mobile services such as high-quality mobile TV and video-on-demand. The current version of LTE offers theoretical peak speeds of 100Mb/s, and is being adopted by major mobile operators and manufacturers such as Orange, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, AT&T, NTT-DoCoMo, Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks. The Commission said that operators worldwide are expected to invest nearly €6 billion (US$8.6 billion) in LTE equipment by 2013. It added that LTE allows radio spectrum to be used more efficiently, and can contribute to the reduction of the so-called ‘digital divide’ between rural and urban areas by delivering mobile broadband to less populated regions.