Telstra said it is one step closer to delivering commercial LTE services at a maximum downstream bandwidth of 1Gbps following the latest trials on its Ericsson-supplied network using LTE device technology from Qualcomm.
In the trial Telstra says it achieved over-the-air downlink speeds of 979Mbps and uplink speeds of 129Mbps as measured using a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) speed test. UDP is the protocol used for real time applications such as voice and video over the Internet. A speedtest.net test recorded bandwidths of up to 926Mbps end-to-end and bandwidths over the air up to 883Mbps.
The result was achieved using four transmit and receive antennas on both the device and the network (4×4 MIMO) and higher order modulation techniques than used in the commercial LTE service. Also, Telstra says the gigabit downlink bandwidth was achieved by the use of Ericsson baseband 5216 hardware that “supercharges radio signal digital processing power.”
Telstra says the test got it close to tripling the current maximum uplink speed seen in most LTE networks around the world.
“Increasing social sharing and video uploads is driving the need for higher uplink performance for smartphone users across the network,” Telstra said. “Improving uplink speeds is also important for remote and onsite workers use of enterprise cloud applications for unified communications, especially video-conferencing apps.”
Telstra gave no indication as to when the bandwidths achieved in the trial would be made available to customers – Stuart Corner
