Telstra’s “world’s fastest wireless broadband” – again

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 02:37

IT Industry - Market

In what has been no secret whatsoever, Telstra’s 21Mbps Next G wireless broadband network running on the 850MHz frequency has been big news at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, but what are the real speeds, as opposed to the “peak speeds” of 21Mbps?

Telstra’s announcement by its (soon to be leaving?) CEO, Sol Trujillo, of the rollout of 21Mbps speeds for its Next G wireless broadband network in Australia, is a news story that has appeared several times over the past few months.

The announcement is covered in detail in an iTWire story from earlier today, but we first heard of the 21Mbps upgrade sometime in 2007, and then several times throughout 2008, with the technology even shown off to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a Telstra “Investor Day” briefing late last year.

There’ll be more 21Mbps Next G news later today too, as Telstra formally unveils the technology to journalists during an 11am briefing at its 400 George St offices in Sydney today, which I’m heading to (and at Melbourne airport as I type).

Telstra has also spoken of the next upgrade to the Next G network, which will double the 21Mbps speeds to a whopping 42Mbps, although that upgrade is still months away and will come at a time when Telstra will probably start rolling out some LTE (Long Term Evolution) basestations, too.

The real question though, for me at least, is how fast true networks speeds will really be for consumers once 21Mbps wireless broadband modems land in the hands of consumers.

After all, as we all know, the advertised “peak speeds” are never the real speeds consumers will experience. Peak speeds are esoteric things experienced in testing labs and are used for marketing purposes.

When Telstra’s Next G network had “peak speeds” of 3.6Mbps, real world speeds ranged from 550Kbps to 1.5Mbps. Then, when the network was upgraded to 14.4Mbps, no 14.4Mbps devices were available, only 7.2Mbps-class devices.

So, what is Telstra promising the real world speeds are for its 21Mbps Next G network?

Continued on page 2, please read on…