Everything Everywhere, the joint venture between British mobile operators Orange UK and T-Mobile UK, is reportedly working with the wholesale arm of fixed line incumbent BT to trial Long Term Evolution (LTE) services. According to ThinkBroadband, the companies are planning to launch trials of the 4G technology in September 2011 in the St Newlyn East area of Cornwall, with the tests expected to run for a three-month period.

Some 200 customers are being sought to take part in the trial, 50% of which will be mobile customers, with the other half being fixed line subscribers. The aim of the project is to ascertain the capabilities of LTE in the 800MHz band for customers in rural regions that currently can either only get slow fixed line broadband or cannot be connected at all via traditional fixed line technologies due to cost or geographical difficulties. Commenting on the development, Tom Alexander, chief executive of Everything Everywhere, noted: ‘We strongly believe that by sharing our network and mobile services in this way, we can make a valuable contribution to the economics of rural broadband service.

Our work with BT is providing a test bed for new technologies such as 4G LTE which, with the correct allocation of sub 1GHz spectrum from the government, has the potential to make a real impact on the way in which we communicate in the future. The government has previously stated its desire for the UK to have the best in class superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015, and we hope to help this vision become a reality.