GLOBAL – We don’t know what was said during what is believed to be the world’s first call made on a next generation 4G LTE network yesterday. It probably wasn’t somebody saying that “the future [is] calling”, but it should have been. I won’t go into the details of what LTE networks are here (read about 4G modems here instead to get some background) but the news reaching us this week of the first official call, using a real base station and standards-compliant software means the future is getting much closer.

Nokia Siemens Networks were the ones to demonstrate this latest development and needless to say, they’re pretty pleased with it. NSN’s Mark Rouanne said “this call is a significant landmark in building and strengthening our entire LTE ecosystem”. We should expect to see commercial networks rolling out LTE services in the next 12 months or so.

This isn’t the first, first, for a Nokia company though. The first GSM call was made on a Nokia car phone, on a Nokia network in 1991. In 2001 Nokia made the world’s first 3G voice call on a commercial 3GPP system. And now, in 2009, comes the first 4G call. So that’ll be Nokia at the head of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th generations of mobile technology. Not a bad set of achievements really. (You might want to have a look here to find out what happened to the first generation call)
You can check out more Nokia firsts in our History of Nokia series. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more on LTE as it happens.