New Zealand will soon have a choice of LTE service providers as Telecom New Zealand gears up to launch 4G services in November this year.

The service follows the February LTE launch from rival Vodafone New Zealand and will initially be made available in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch from November 12. The service, which uses spectrum in the 1800MHz spectrum band, will be available to both prepaid and pay-monthly customers at no additional cost on the operator’s current plans.

“Offering a free upgrade to 4G is yet another way that Telecom is transforming how people use their smartphones,” said Telecom retail chief executive Chris Quin.

“Whether they are shopping online, streaming music, or making stutter-free video calls to family and friends, 4G will allow our customers to do a whole lot more, a whole lot faster on their mobile devices. 4G is part of our vision to help Kiwis have experiences that once seemed impossible,” he added.

Quin added that the service will allow businesses to working remotely more efficiently and use cloud services on their mobiles and that Telecom New Zealand devised its pricing plans after listening to customer concerns about using up their mobile data on the faster 4G network.

“We want to encourage our customers to use their data freely on 4G, to truly explore and experience what the network has to offer them. So to give them more peace of mind we’ve launched our new Ultra Mobile ‘4G-ready’ plans, which include plans with higher data caps,” he explained.

Telecom New Zealand will also offer wifi services as a free add-on for its pay-monthly and prepaid mobile customers.

The operator announced it had began trialling its LTE service in December last year. Alcatel-Lucent ran the trial in the Lower Hutt area of Wellington using the 2600MHz spectrum, while the Auckland trial took place in parts of the North Shore, also on the 2600MHz spectrum, and was conducted by Huawei. COO David Havercroft revealed that vendors Cisco and Ericsson also formed part of the deployment.

“The network build has progressed extremely well, with promising results from testing and excellent collaboration between vendors Huawei, Cisco and Ericsson, in conjunction with existing 3G network technology provider Alcatel-Lucent,” said Havercroft.

“Telecom’s decision to make its 4G network freely available to all of its customers is another significant step towards providing an integrated network of fibre, 3G, 4G and wifi that will deliver the rich, relevant, real-time experiences and instant access to information today’s consumers and businesses increasingly expect.”

The LTE North America conference is taking place on the 21st-22nd November 2013, in Dallas, Texas, USA. Click here NOW to download a brochure for the event.