Vodafone Germany has announced aggressive LTE rollout plans and tiered data bundles dependent on service speeds, according to a LTEWorld report. The article claims the operator announced at a press conference this week that it plans to serve more than 1,000 German municipalities with its LTE Zuhause (LTE At Home) service by the end of this year, increasing this to 1,500 by next March. By the end of 2011, the operator will reportedly offer “a comprehensive network.” In addition, Vodafone unveiled its data packages and tariffs; 7.2 Mb/s downstream speeds, with a 10GB cap, will be available for a monthly tariff of EUR39.99, whilst an extra EUR10 a month will enable customers to get 21.6 Mb/s maximum download speeds and a 15GB cap. LTEWorld claims that EUR69.99 a month will buy users 30GB of data and peak downloads of 50 Mb/s. Interestingly, Telecompaper reports that when consumers use up their allotted data allowance, the download speed is automatically reduced to “UMTS levels (384 kb/s)” until a new month begins. The LTE tariffs cost EUR10 per month less for existing Vodafone postpaid customers. Vodafone Germany’s LTE network is being built by Huawei and Ericsson.

In May the country’s government raised EUR4.38 billion in spectrum auctions, much of which can be used for LTE services. The country’s four operators – Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefonica O2 and KPN’s E-Plus – all scored varying levels of spectrum. Earlier this year it was reported that Telefonica O2 Germany plans to build two LTE networks in Munich and Halle before the end of 2010 using 2.6GHz spectrum and another two LTE networks based on the 800 MHz band in two rural areas: Ebersberg (east of Munich) and Teutschenthal (west of Halle), using equipment from Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks. Meanwhile this week it was reported that Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile has deployed its first LTE base station in the German state of Brandenburg. The base station uses the 800 MHz frequency band and is located in Kyritz. The operator wants to increase LTE coverage to 500 locations in Germany, currently without any broadband coverage, by the end of this year, followed by another 1,000 ‘broadband gap’ locations in 2011.