(Telecompaper) Telecom New Zealand has unveiled its LTE rollout plans. The company plans to have LTE live on a large part of its smartphone network in Auckland by October this year. The company will then extend LTE coverage to Wellington and Christchurch by Christmas, and expects to have LTE live on close to half of its nationwide smartphone network during 2014. Telecom also announced hat it has selected Huawei to build its network of 4G-capable mobile sites known as the eUTRAN. Over the past three months Telecom has been trialling Huawei's LTE technology in Auckland and Rotorua. The testing included some new developments like carrier aggregation, which allows Telecom to use two different spectrum bands simultaneously, and in the trials it produced maximum peak speeds of up to 250 Mbps. Telecom said it has increased the speed, coverage and capacity offered by the smartphone network over time. Its programme of investment included installing dual carrier HSPA+ on more than half of mobile sites, fast backhaul to 90 percent of mobile sites, and from mid 2013 rolling out Optical Transport Network (OTN) technology to the network core.