Vodafone Italia has carried out the first LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) trial on Italian soil in the city of Naples. The operator announced that it had achieved download speeds of 250 Mbps during the trial, more than double the highest possible theoretical speed currently available on Italian mobile networks. To demonstrate the potential of LTE-A, a 1 GB file was downloaded in around 30 seconds at the presentation, which was attended by the star players of Naples FC, Marek Hamsik and Gonzalo Higuain, as well as the team's manager Rafa Benitez. The company specified that LTE-A, which use the 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz spectrum bands, is currently only offered on an experimental basis but that it would be available at the start of 2015 when the first LTE-A-compatible smartphones hit the markets.
