German opertaor Deutsche Telekom has announced launch of commercial LTE service.

German opertaor Deutsche Telekom has announced launch of commercial LTE service. The new service named as “Call & Surf Comfort via Funk” is now available in areas without DSL coverage. LTE users now can have up to 3 Mbps speed in downlink and allows to upload speed up to 500 Kbps.

To use the LTE service customer may require a special router. As per Telekom, the router comes with a SIM card. This SIM card is only available site-specific, so it can not be used everywhere. New service costs EUR 39.95 per month with contract of 24 months.

By the end of this year, Telekom expects to provide LTE and HSPA in some 1,500 areas. In August 2010, Telekom added the first LTE mobile base station in Germany to its network, in Kyritz in Brandenburg. In addition, in the past year the company boosted large parts of its HSPA/UMTS network to a top speed of 21 Mbit/s, while increasing coverage by over ten percent. Telekom plans to expand its HSPA/UMTS network, doubling available bandwidth in the entire network to up to 42 Mbit/s by the end of the year.