TeliaSonera’s LTE service – the first commercial deployment in the world – has been tested by Nordic analyst firm Northstream and appears to be providing similar speeds to those Verizon has publicly anticipated from its own launch of the next-generation technology. Using a dongle from Samsung, Northstream found that TeliaSonera’s data rates “never exceeded 12 Mb/s in downlink” and the service was prone to dropping, although it added that “more impressive… was the 5 Mb/s uplink.” The results tally with Verizon’s belief that its own LTE network launch – due later this year – will enable average downlink data rates per user of 5-12 Mb/s and 2-5 Mb/s in the uplink. 

Northstream’s findings are interesting because TeliaSonera has heavily hyped the speeds of its LTE offering, claiming “mobile broadband speeds up to a maximum speed of 100 Mb/s,” which are “up to 10 times higher than with Turbo-3G.” However, it’s worth noting that Northstream acknowledged TeliaSonera’s LTE deployment is in its very early stages. The analyst firm also didn’t reveal exactly where it tested the service. “Our first LTE experience is a very positive one,” noted Northstream’s blog. “It works, and that’s respectable.” Read Northstream’s full blog here.