Telecom New Zealand will begin 4G LTE trial in parts of Wellington and Auckland from Friday this week. The Auckland trial will take place in parts of the North Shore on the 2600MHz spectrum and will be conducted by Huawei. Alcatel-Lucent will run the trial in the Lower Hutt area of Wellington, also on the 2600MHz spectrum. Telecom is aiming to launch the new network late in 2013/early in 2014. 

Telecom is also planning two smaller trials of LTE outside of the main centres. Alcatel-Lucent will conduct a trial on behalf of Telecom in a rural part of southern Hawke’s Bay on the 700MHz spectrum (which will become available after the switch over to digital television) and Huawei will trial at 1800MHz and 2600MHz frequencies in a small area of Rotorua.

This first phase of the trial will run till mid-February and will focus on testing how the network performs in a New Zealand environment in a series of situations - for example its performance under a heavy load. It will also work through possible coverage models for the network, and identify and work through any technical issues that may arise during the deployment process. 

The second phase, which involves customer trials, will begin in mid-February and run until the end of March. 

Telecom also announced today that it had selected Ericsson to supply equipment for the Home Location Register (HLR) combined with the Home Subscriber Service (HSS) a core part of both the existing 3G and new 4G LTE network.