Telstra achieves 149.4Mbps LTE speeds

Telstra has reached download speeds of up to 149.4Mbps as part of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile technology trial with Chinese network vendor Huawei.

(Broadcast tower image by
Steve Beger, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Two trials were conducted utilising the 1800MHz spectrum in Box Hill in Melbourne over the last six months. The peak 149.4Mbps downlink speed was achieved in a controlled lab environment trial using 20MHz of spectrum. The test achieved a peak uplink speed of 59Mbps. A field trial used 10MHz and achieved a peak downlink speed of 69.3Mbps and a peak uplink speed of 24Mbps.

Huawei provided Telstra with a small number of base stations, test terminals and IP multimedia subsystem test servers for the trial.

"The significance of the trial with Huawei equipment is that it allowed Telstra to test the performance of LTE at 1800MHz and we were able to test the limits of the technology and explore its performance against a number of criteria," Telstra's network & access technologies executive director Mike Wright said in a statement.

Huawei chief technology officer Peter Rossi said that the trials showed new possibilities for the 1800MHz spectrum in the future.

"As mobile customers move away from 2G services and onto 3G and LTE, 1800MHz spectrum will increasingly become available to be re-farmed by operators. The overwhelming success of these trials shows that 1800MHz can be an attractive option for deploying LTE where access to other spectrum bands is constrained," he said.

Telstra began trialling on the 1800MHz spectrum with Huawei in July, but has also conducted separate LTE trials with the network technology company's competitors Nokia Siemens Networks and Ericsson.