Sweden’s TeliaSonera plans to switch on LTE in the Swedish city of Visby by the end of the month. The commercial launch will make Visby – on the Swedish island of Gotland – the operator’s third LTE market following its pioneering launches of the technology in Stockholm (Sweden) and Oslo (Norway) at the end of last year. TeliaSonera also announced earlier this month that its Finnish arm (Sonera) will build the country’s first LTE network in the city of Turku, and will have it ready for “pre-commercial” use by the end of this month. In Visby, the operator said that the LTE network will cover most of the central city when it goes live on 30 June and will be gradually expanded thereafter. “Visby is strongly associated with summer and holiday – perfect for the world’s fastest mobile broadband, among other things makes it easier and more fun to use moving images such as web TV in the laptop,” said Erik Hallberg, head of mobility services at TeliaSonera.

TeliaSonera intends to ramp-up rollout of LTE across several of its markets over the next few years. It has committed to expand the Swedish network into 25 cities across the country by 2010 and into a further four in Norway. It is expected to follow the Finland launch with a similar deployment in Denmark and in the Baltic region where it has subsidiaries in Estonia (EMT), Lithuania (Omnitel) and Latvia (LMT). Click here to read our recent Snapshot analysis on TeliaSonera’s LTE rollout.