The country’s first trial of the technology has begun in Cornwall with around 200 residents of the area are taking part in the trial. According to The Telegraph the trial is using LTE technology, and those taking part have been given equipment that allows them to try out the network for their home broadband as well as on the move.

Tests done in a laboratory have found the network would allow download speeds of up to 150Mbps, but is expected to offer 10Mbps to start with. This will still be a big leap forward compared to 3G that according to Ofcom only offers around 1.5Mbps on average.

This trial being conducted by BT and Everything Everywhere could also be used to provide rural areas with better download speeds. The British Government is attempting to provide such areas with a better broadband service by 2015.

The fixed line network upgrade program planned by BT is only going to cover around seventy percent of properties. This will concentrate on urban areas where return on the investment will be higher than those in rural areas.

Great Britain has fallen behind many other countries with the take up of 4G technology, and the 4G networks in the country are set to use the 800MHz spectrum band. Regulator Ofcom is planning to start auctioning 4G licenses during the first half of 2012.

More About: 4G, mobile broadband

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Kate Solomon over at TechRadar is reporting that the study by Ofcom found that O2 were the quickest of the networks. This was compared to 3, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile using dongles and data cards, and the O2 network loaded web pages the quickest. Everything Everywhere which is now Orange and T-Mobile were the slowest two providers of mobile broadband.

This survey didn’t take in to account data speeds with smartphones only dongles and data cards. Everything Everywhere released a statement mentioning the fact that smartphones were not included in the test, and added it “excludes the millions of users that access the internet through their 3G smart phones.”

They also said the findings didn’t include Wi-Fi and 2G data as well, and were working with Ofcom about their concerns. O2 obviously were pleased with the findings and said “Our customers are seeing the benefit from the huge investment we’ve made in our network.”

But it’s not all good news as it still took web pages about 8.5 seconds to download with speeds of 1.5Mbps. Areas that had good 3G coverage this fell to around 2.2 seconds, but this was not at peak traffic times. Do you pay for a mobile broadband service? How reliable is it?

More About: mobile broadband, O2, Ofcom

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