Vodafone Germany has chosen Huawei and Ericsson as suppliers for its LTE network upgrade. The operator plans to start work on the LTE upgrade at the end of September, and says that by next year 1,500 base stations will incorporate the technology. “We eventually plan to upgrade all base stations in Germany to LTE,” said Friedrich Joussen, CEO of Vodafone Germany. “We will be commencing network extension into [rural] regions which don’t currently have any coverage in the near future, providing actual transmission speeds of around 3 Mb/s right from day one.” In the cities, Joussen is expecting much higher average speeds.