Orange has pledged to roll-out LTE in all its markets in the EU by 2015, and has selected the French city of Marseille as the location for an LTE pilot beginning in June.

The France Telecom-owned operator is to deploy LTE in the 2.6GHz and 800MHz bands. The Marseille deployment will boast peak download speeds of 150Mb/s, claims Orange, which plans to switch on LTE in other French cities soon after.

The French LTE deployments will be supported by Orange France’s HSPA+ network, which now covers over 50 percent of the population, and most of the country’s major cities. Coverage is set to increase to 60 percent by year-end, with the addition of new cities such as Bordeaux, Nancy, Metz, Strasbourg, Toulouse and Angouleme. A new data tariff range called ‘H+’ has been launched to enable access to the 42Mb/s networks.

Meanwhile, Orange’s pledge to roll-out LTE across its EU markets was included as one of the operator’s “ten commitments” to contribute to the progress of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda for Europe.

It welcomed the EU’s decision to make more mobile broadband spectrum available, but warned “Europe could do a great deal to promote a more favourable environment for the roll-out of radio access networks.”

Among Orange’s other commitments was a pledge to make Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) available to 15 million households and 80 percent of businesses by 2020 in France – and “participate in the roll-out of very high speed broadband rollout in our European markets.”