Alcatel-Lucent has signed an agreement with Etisalat to extend its’s LTE coverage across its footprint including a new partnership in Sri Lanka. Company also announced that Alcatel-Lucent and Regional Telecom, a communications service provider in Northern Iraq, are to launch the 4G LTE network in Iraq.

TeliaSonera's LTE network now operates in nearly 50 cities in Finland. During the fall, operator introduced LTE in Kajaani, Kokkola, Kotka, Lappeenranta, Naantali, Rauma, Salo and Savonlinna.

Indian telecom operator Aircel and Huawei have recently conducted GSM/UMTS/LTE-TDD trial on Aircel's existing GSM/UMTS network in India.

In France, the Government has launched a public consultation as part of the process of devising a national strategy for 5G. In this context French regulator, Arcep is opening up a window for conducting 5G pilots.

Huawei has announced that it had helped build a 3.5GHz LTE-A trial network in Japan. A recent demonstration of the network showed it could support a max 770 Mb/s download speed by making use of LTE-A technologies like Carrier Aggregation (CA), Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) and Cloud BB (Baseband).

Etisalat and Huawei have announced the signing of a commercial LTE contract to commence deployment of the LTE network in the UAE. Mr.

Australian operator Telstra has announced that more than 3.2 million 4G devices are now operating on its 4G network. This includes more than 360,000 4G smartphones since June 30 this year, or more than 25,000 per week. Telstra launched 4G mobile network two years ago.