Ericsson finishes LTE sites for PLDT

Swedish telecommunications  firm Ericsson has completed the installation of new high-speed Internet LTE sites for Smart Communications, a unit of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., a statement on Friday showed.

Ericsson said the 250 sites were meant to improve mobile services, in particular for users of smartphones.  Smart’s LTE network spans 46 cities and 69 municipalities across the country.

“We can confirm that some of the sites we tested registered downlink speeds of up to 50MBps, in real time and in the live network,” Elie Hanna, Ericsson Philippines and Pacific Islands President, said in the statement.

LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is the global standard for the fourth generation of mobile networks (4G) supported by all major players in the industry.

LTE offers the capacity and the speed to handle a rapid increase in data traffic.

Data cited in the statement showed that there will be five billion mobile broadband subscriptions in 2017. This means 60 percent of the world’s population will have LTE coverage 2018, it said.

“Ericsson has delivered more than 160 LTE/EPC networks worldwide of which more than 90 have gone live commercially,” the statement showed.

These include networks for all of the top 10 operators ranked by number of LTE subscribers worldwide in 2012.