Telstra in partnership with Ericsson and Qualcomm showcased download speeds of 979Mbps and upload speeds of 129Mbps using a single device on Telstra’s live network.
Early this year, TeliaSonera Norway and Huawei conducted an LTE Advanced Pro (4.5G) testing over its live commercial mobile network, hitting similar speeds in Oslo, Norway. Swisscom also achieved close to 1Gbps in a testing on its 4G network in April.
The tests were conducted using carrier aggregation, 64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) uplink, 256 QAM downlink, and 4x4 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technologies using Ericsson's Baseband 5216 hardware, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X16 LTE modem test device.
According to Telstra, increasing social sharing and video uploads are driving the need for higher uplink performance for smartphone users across the network. Improving uplink speeds is also important for remote and onsite workers use of enterprise cloud applications for unified communications, especially video-conferencing apps, it added.
Mike Wright, Group Managing Director Networks, Telstra
The pairing of higher data speeds on the downlink and the uplink is a key milestone in the ongoing delivery of the ultimate data experience. Our tests also highlight the joint engineering capability we bring to such a complex blend of new software and hardware technologies in real world end to end conditions.
Thomas Norén, Head of Radio Product Management, Ericsson
Leading operators such as Telstra, continue to push boundaries of the LTE standard, utilizing LTE Advanced carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and higher order modulation with 64 and 256 QAM, to ensure their networks are ready to meet continuing growth in data traffic and high performance expectations of customers.
