LTF for LTE: EU commits to long term funding for LTE research

Well there's certainly substantial research cash on offer. The first tranche of €18 million will be distributed by the beginning of 2010 and negotiation over that is to start next month, says the EC. The research effort is to be aimed at LTE Advanced, the next set of technologies in the evolution, which is expected to push speeds up to the gigabit per second zone. The first stage of LTE is designed to reach speeds of 100 Mbit/s.

But if you're wondering if I've left a nought off the €18 million figure - you have a point. In this era of multi-billion Euro bank bail-outs, €18 million sounds like the sort of sum you might find down the back of a European Commission sofa.

In fact this is just the start. There's almost certain to be more money on-tap over the next few years as the EU is currently budgeted to invest more than €700m between 2007 and 2013 into research on future networks, half of which is supposed to be on wireless.

The track record is solid too. Between 2004 and 2007, the EU supported research on optimisation and standardisation of LTE (the WINNER I and II projects, run by a consortium of 41 European companies and universities) with €25 million. This led to the development of the first concept for an LTE-based network infrastructure.

Partly as result of this activity, LTE is currently being trialled by mobile operators in Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK, and is expected to be commercially available in Sweden and Norway in the first half of 2010.