Vividwireless flags TD-LTE rollout

Stuart Corner
Monday, 07 February 2011 15:33

IT Industry - Strategy

Vividwireless says it is sufficiently impressed with the price and performance of TD-LTE technology that it could use it for the deployment of planned network expansions in major East Coast capital cities.

vividwireless has an 802.16e WiMAX network covering most of Perth and limited coverage in Sydney and Melbourne - primarily around major universities. It is about to turn on similar limited coverage networks in Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra but wider coverage of cities other than Perth is dependent on funding that it has yet to raise.

Its current WiMAX network is based on Huawei SingleRAN base stations that are software upgradable to TD-LTE and vividwireless has been trialling the technology with three base stations in Sydney - in Redfern and Zetland in the inner city and at Horsley Park in the city's far west.

The two inner city sites provide contiguous coverage enabling vividwireless to test cell handover. The Horsley Park site is being used to test very long distance coverage using fixed CPE with a very high gain RF section.

According to vividwireless, its two month trial has delivered peak downstream bandwidths up to 128Mbps and consistent bandwidths between 40 - 70Mbps using20MHz of spectrum in the 2.3GHz band (However there was very little load on the trial network).

At a demonstration of the technology at vividwireless' headquarters in the Australian Technology Park in Redfern, Sydney, vividwireless CEO, Martin Mercer, said: "The purpose of this trial was to see if the advanced TD-LTE technology is mature enough to deliver extremely fast mobile broadband services to our customers This trial has established that [such] services are within our reach, and can be delivered quickly and cost effectively."

He added: "The technology is far more mature than we had expected. The Huawei SingleRAN solution is basically ready to go today and is at a price point that would enable us to take service to market at prices comparable to what we offer today.

"We could deploy this technology in our east coast rollout and provide customers with services superior to those we provide today and equivalent prices. The question for us now based on the results of the trial is: do we rollout TD-LTE on the East Coast'¦and do we deploy it in other markets as well?"

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