Dubai: Du is in talks with Apple to unlock the long term evolution (LTE) feature on iPhone 5 for launching it in the UAE in the middle of next month, said a top official.

“Apple has selected certain service providers globally to enable LTE with iPhone 5. They are going and testing every service provider and then only they open the LTE feature. As a phone it will work but the LTE capability will not,” Hatem Bamatraf, executive vice-president, network development and operation at du, told Gulf News.

LTE will be enabled according to “Apple’s schedule.” “We are in talks with Apple. The good news is that Apple is supporting the 1800MHZ frequency spectrum which we are using, same as the UK,” he said.

Right now du is covering only the main cities for LTE network. “We expect to cover 90 per cent of the population by 2014.”

“We have seen signs of demand for LTE dongles but not a remarkable one, at the same time there are no devices to support LTE. Once LTE smartphones penetrate the market we will definitely see a huge demand,” he said.

He said that 900MHZ is used for 2G spectrum while the 800MHz is used for other broadcasting companies. The national spectrum plan is decided by Telecom Regulatory Authority.

“We cannot jump into any spectrum because many of the spectrum ranges are used by other agencies,” he said.

“As a telecom operator we are looking beyond LTE, the next phase of LTE, as we have tested speeds of up to 300 megabytes per second (Mbps) amongst other network advantages,” Bamatraf said. In the future, he said that LTE will evolve to one Giga bits per second (Gbps). “We could see 600Mbps speed by next year.

“We are constantly seeking new ways to improve our networks and provide customers with the pinnacle of technology applications. Our customers will benefit significantly from these experience-boosting features when we launch them,” said Bamatraf.

Customers with LTE-compatible handsets, or using du’s 4G LTE internet key, can currently enjoy up to 100Mbps mobile broadband speeds. With the roll-out of the two new technologies, the LTE experience will be boosted even further to provide customers with an unprecedented mobile broadband connection.

The company recently tested Circuit Switched Fallback, which provides a mechanism to hand over voice calls to du’s 3G network. This enables customers to run data connections over LTE, while also being able to receive and place voice calls on a 3G network without interrupting their mobile broadband connection. du’s existing 3G network has been already upgraded to support high definition (HD) voice, which will further enrich the quality of voice calls.

While there are currently no handsets that support mobile broadband speeds of 300Mbps, “we will introduce new features soon to our 4G LTE customers, to greatly improve their experience,” he said.

“Whenever there is a new technology, we will be one of the early adopters and want to show our customers that we will never stop testing a new technology,” he said.