Telstra Pushes Beyond 4G With 1 Gbps Testing

Telstra’s 4G network now provides coverage to 94 percent of the Australian population, though it last month announced that it will be rolled out to 99 percent of the population by June 2017, with continuing deployment of its voice over LTE (VoLTE) capability and investment in its national network a priority. Telstra officially switched on carrier aggregation in 2014, calling the new technology 4GX and heralding it as the future of super-fast mobile communication in Australia.

Telstra also supports Category 9 handsets on its LTE network, delivering a peak speed of 450Mbps.

Since then, Telstra has shown off a number of mobile devices across different ‘categories, ‘ capable of reaching higher and higher theoretical download speeds – essentially, the higher the category, the faster the download. In September, Telstra pushed into the heady realm of 600Mbps speeds with a Cat 11 mobile hotspot.

Just as importantly, explained Ericsson, “we have also been able to hit download speeds of over 843 Mbps end to end over the Internet to the speedtest.net site Reaching speeds of 1 Gbps was an original goal of the LTE standard, making this demonstration a key milestone in the evolution of LTE-Advanced”.

In a live test, the companies aggregated 100MHz of Telstra’s spectrum holdings across five separate 4G channels to achieve downlink speeds in excess of 950 Mbps, as measured by the UDP speed test application.

Telstra in collaboration with Ericsson has achieved “a world first testing” of a 1 Gbps speed capability on a commercial mobile network as the telco looks beyond 4G.

While 1Gbps is still classed as 4G, the global consensus considers it the absolute pinnacle of what 4G can be. Following its successful test, the firm suggested LTE technology is finally “moving beyond the 4G barrier”. “The demonstration of 1 Gbps end to end capability shows the advanced state of these standards and our ability to rapidly bring them into commercial service in order to deliver increased capability in our network to meet growing demand”, he added.

As for when such a technology might become commercially available, Wright noted that there is still work to be done.