**Four firms have started bidding in Europe’s first auction for fourth generation (4G) spectrum.**The amount raised by the German government is expected to be well below the 50bn euros (£44bn;$68bn) made from auctioning 3G licences in 2000.
But the demand is strong, with analysts expecting the government to make between 5bn and 10bn euros.
Mobile phone operators are keen to have more spectrum because it allows greater data traffic on their networks.
This traffic includes data from smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone, broadband data cards as well as voice calls.
The four network providers in Germany, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Royal KPN’s E-Plus and Telefonica’s O2 Germany will be bidding for 4G spectrum.
The 4G technology, also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) will mean that the extra data traffic generated by technologies such as broadband will be transferred on these operators’ networks at faster speeds.This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.