Belgium’s second largest mobile network operator by subscribers, Mobistar, has reportedly been trialling Long Term Evolution (LTE) services since the beginning of April, according to Datanews.be. The cellco is understood to be testing the technology from a building in Evere, one of Brussels’ nineteen municipalities, and around the town of Keiberg, with the tests being carried out by a team from parent company France Telecom (FT) which already has experience with LTE trials. The first tests apparently managed to record downlinks speeds of 60Mbps. Mobistar was issued a licence to trial LTE services by the Belgian Institute for Post and Telecommunications (BIPT) back in March 2010.
Meanwhile, Benoit Scheen, Mobistar’s CEO, has also revealed that the cellco is aiming to boost the download speeds available over its 3G network. At present it offers a top theoretical download speed of 7.2Mbps, with uploads capped at 1.4Mbps, but by the end of summer Mobistar hopes to increase the former to 14.4Mbps, while it also expects to deploy HSPA+ technology in some major cities by the end of 2010, further increasing downlink rates to up to 28.8Mbps.