Italy is all set to launch its mega fast mobile broadband service with speeds up to 28Mbps. Ericsson, the renowned telecom technology provider and Telecom Italia have been working on the development for quite some time, and the first city to be part of the roll out would be Milan, in June. This would then be followed by a national coverage in the later months of the year.

The new service in Italy is believed to be four times faster than the 3g broadband technology available in the UK. The service is based on the Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO) technology, which makes use of multiple branches of antennas to achieve greater speeds.

Italy is following the lead of Australia, where the telecom firm Telstra recently announced the launch of its 21MB mobile broadband service. That service would be available to the public in April this year, but the launch for business customers has already taken place.

Telecom Italia is yet to announce the prices for the new service, but keeping in view the high prices in Australia, chances are that the users will have to pay a premium for access to this new service.

Ericsson, based in Sweden, is a leading network technology company, which is currently at the forefront of HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) development and has played a key role in the Italian deployment. However, whether the new service would be able to overcome the typical mobile broadband problems like distance, weather and network congestion is yet to be seen.