TeliaSonera’s Finnish arm (Sonera) has announced it is to build the country’s first LTE network in the city of Turku. The Swedish-based firm says it expects to launch the network for pre-commercial use by the end of this month, a move that will help it “prepare for the commercial launch of next generation mobile broadband services.” It added that “Sonera will make decisions on the expansion and commercial roll-out of the 4G network in Finland later in 2010 based on local market conditions.” This timeframe will make Finland the operator’s third LTE market following its pioneering launches of the technology in Sweden (Stockholm) and Norway (Oslo). According to Turku’s mayor, Mikko Pukkinen, the Finnish launch will form part of the city’s European Capital of Culture project. “One of Turku’s important goals during its Capital of Culture year is to open events up for a wider audience through the Internet,” said Pukkinen. “The network that is built now will also support the city’s development after 2011.” Sonera – which first tested LTE in Finland in December 2009 – says the network will offer mobile broadband services at around 20Mb/s to 80Mb/s and a maximum up to 100Mb/s.

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). It has said recently it will offer handsets supporting its new LTE networks by early next year, a more aggressive timeframe than other early movers to the technology such as Verizon Wireless. Click here to read our recent Snapshot analysis on TeliaSonera’s LTE rollout.