Rogers CTO on LTE: “We’ll be the first in Canada to deploy it”

Back in October Rogers announced a LTE (Long Term Evolution) technical trial at Ericsson’s Ottawa Research and Development facility. Today during the Rogers Q4 investor call president and CEO Nadir Mohamed said: “We’re committed to LTE. We’re committed to deploying it and it’s going to be a multi-year deployment” beginning in 2011.

In a conversation I had with Rogers CTO Bob Berner he stated the following about their LTE plans:

“We are committed to deploying an LTE network in Canada and will be once again be Canadian leaders… Our trial in Ottawa is in multiple frequency bands. High-band and low-bands. And we think that’s really important because different frequency bands have different performance characteristics in enabling the customer experience… it gives customers the optimal experience regardless of what circumstance they are in… We are actually committed to deploying this technology (LTE). This is our path going forward. People (other carriers) are talking about we are capable, we could… we are actually going to do it and we’ll be the first in Canada to deploy it… what we are really saying here is that we’re not sort of stopping at HSPA+… we are going directly to LTE as our go forward technology that takes us into the digital pathway.”

All the carriers are moving towards LTE (4G) and recently WIND Mobile stated their LTE testing is seeing “average download speeds of 50-60Mbps”. Last week we shot a video of the TELUS LTE trials that show download speeds reaching 73.9 Mbps. Rogers stated they are currently testing Internet sticks “on the street and in real live… in urban and suburban areas”. No word was given about the speeds they are receiving but stated more information will be available soon.