It plans to launch commercial services in 2013 but is giving no indication of what form these will take and on whether they will be integrated with its, just launched, FD-LTE services operating in the 1800MHz band.
Günther Ottendorfer, managing director Optus Networks, said: "We are undertaking the trial to define the best scenario for us for launch next year. We have not finalised our planning. I would expect you will see the ecosystem enable a quite smooth working together of different devices."
Optus gained 98MHz in metropolitan areas - far more than any other mobile operator has available for LTE services and is making much of its ability to use this spectrum to support very high bandwidth services.
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It is using equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks for the trial, yet vividwireless is presently using Huawei gear for the WiMAX service it operates in this spectrum across Perth and in limited areas of Sydney and Melbourne.
vividwireless has already trialled TD-LTE services and both it and Huawei have claimed that the Huawei gear is easily upgradeable to LTE.
At its announcement of the trial, Optus demonstrated the simultaneous streaming of eight HDTV signals by using 60MHz of the spectrum, comparing this to FD-LTE running over 10MHz in the 1800MHz.
However this was achieved by using three separate 20MHz channels of TD-LTE, the ability to bond separate blocks of spectrum into a single service will only be available with LTE-Advanced services.
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