Telstra to trial future wireless technology, LTE, on Next G

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 18 March 2010 15:24

IT Industry - Strategy

Telstra has announced plans to start trialling in its Next G network the Long Term Evolution (LTE) 3G technology capable of delivering wireless broadband at, theoretically almost 200Mbps.

Telstra plans to conduct trials starting from May in its laboratories and in the network in urban and rural areas in conjunction with incumbent supplier Ericsson and with Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei.

The trial gives Huawei its first crack at becoming a major supplier to Telstra. Telstra's Hong Kong subsidiary, CSL, is already trialling LTE feed into Telstra's planning for LTE along with the results of its Australian trials.

Huawei said it would participate in trials in Victoria and would have more than20 staff involved. It will supply base station equipment, core network equipment and LTE terminals "to demonstrate Huawei's end-to-end LTE capability."

Telstra says the trials will "seek to understand a variety of LTE's attributes including radio access characteristics, coverage, performance, signal propagation and various enhanced packet core features."

Although it has made no commitment to LTE rollout Telstra has indicated a likely timeframe of 2013 and maximum theoretical downstream bandwidths of 172Mbps and above. However its LTE rollout plans and the maximum bandwidths available will be heavily dependent on future spectrum allocations.

Meanwhile it is continuing to be a pioneer in the deployment of the latest HSPA technologies, which require no additional spectrum. It was the first carrier in the world to rollout dual carrier HSPA+ in its network at the end of last year.

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