Telefónica carried out the first public tests of its 4th generation mobiles (LTE -Long Term Evolution) connected to both its GPRS and UMTS mobile networks and its landline ADSL network.

The Director of Engineering Development for Telefónica Spain, Ignacio Camarero, presented this first demonstration with LTE, that offers download speeds of 100 megabits and upload speeds of 50 megabits and said that from now on they would continue to test and update the software with a view to launching the technology commercially in 2011.

Until then, Telefónica will continue to develop its mobile network and, towards the middle of this year, will start to use its new HSDPA+ technology that will offer download speeds of 20 megabits per second.

Camarero explained that this new HSPA technology, which would use the UMTS network, could be developed to reach speeds of up to 80 megabits per second and when this happened, the new fourth generation technology would be introduced.

The main uses for this new technology, according to Camarero, will be in high definition multimedia services and data networks.

In today's demonstration the first telephone call was made from LTE to a second generation 'phone, plus an LTE videocall to a UMTS mobile, and data and images were downloaded to a PC at speeds of over 140 megabits per second.

Camarero pointed out that when data was first downloaded by mobile phone (GPRS) in 2001, it took 34.7 hours to download a gigabyte.  The same volume of data now takes 20 minutes with HSPA technology and when LTE comes into operation it will take just 54 seconds.

The current tests are being done using an Ericsson LTE prototype called Berta, approximately twice the size of a PDA, although the best results are being achieved with a much more cumbersome piece of equipment that will have to undergo substantial development before it turns into a small mobile like the current UMTS ones.