According to Ihab Ghattas, assistant president of Huawei Middle East, the Chinese telecommunications equipment and solutions provider plans to launch its first LTE/SAE commercial network in June 2009, providing LTE/SAE infrastructure to mobile operators.

Ghattas announced the decision in his report "Preparing for the future technology trends – LTE focus" at the meeting held by the SAMENA Telecommunications Council. He said the rapid development and benefits of wireless technology has seen mobile broadband evolve from UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+ to LTE, which offers more efficiency than other networks. Expectations are that by 2015 LTE subscriber base will reach 400 to 450 million, generating revenues of almost EUR150 billion.

According to a report released by the international technology market research company ABI Research, about 300,000 LTE base stations will be completed before 2014 and the total investments in these base stations are almost USD18 billion.

Ghattas added that LTE and System Architecture Evolution are third-generation partnership projects concepts, defining long-term evolution for radio access technology and core networks, respectively. However, when enhanced, they are no longer inseparable. LTE can be deployed by operators with heavy UMTS investments as a complement at hotspots as well as by operators who plan to directly deploy LTE on a wide scale.

As one of the first promoters of LTE research and a member of the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance, Huawei says it has become the world's first equipment provider that has completed the multi-user mobile trial of LTE. In addition, the company is cooperating with leading operators in Europe, North America and Japan to jointly deploy the LTE trial network.