Slovak Telekom has launched LTE services across five cities in Slovakia, which the operator claims is the country’s largest LTE deployment thus far.
The network is based on Ericsson’s multi-standard RBS 6000 base station. The vendor is the sole supplier for the network and is also providing network optimisation, systems integration, multi-vendor verification and other services.
Using spectrum the in the 1800MHz band, the network will provide download speeds of up to 73Mbps and upload speeds of 23Mbps. Slovak Telekom also plans on implementing VoLTE support. The operator is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom and is currently the country’s second largest operator with 2.27 million subscribers.
“We have launched the first Slovak nationwide LTE network and our ambition is to build the most advanced mobile network in our country,” said Slovak Telekom chairman and CEO Miroslav Majoro. “Following the launch in five cities we plan to cover 20% of Slovakia’s population in the first three months, and more locations will follow in 2014.”
