Featured, Features - Monday, March 7, 2011 14:04 - 10 Comments

How LTE will become Telstra’s capacity trump card

If you believe the levels of hype currently emanating from telcos in the United States about their ‘fourth-generation’ or 4G mobile networks, the new deployments are all about speed.

“Verizon 4G LTE is lightning fast. Lightning strong. Think it, and 4G LTE makes it happen. Download movies in minutes. Photos in seconds. Apps. Games. News. It’s what you want, when you want it,” screams the marketing coverage on Verizon’s 4G promotional site. There’s even a little speed wheel demonstrating how much faster the new network is than the dated past.

And there’s no doubt the Long-Term Evolution standard which Verizon is using and all of Australia’s major mobile telcos plan to adopt over the next 18 months theoretically offers greater speeds — up to 100Mbps and even beyond; a step change from the performance of the nation’s mobile networks today.

At the Mobile World Congress several weeks ago, Telstra announced it would install LTE in mobile towers in the CBDs of all Australian capital cities and selected regional centres by the end of 2011. To do so, Telstra will use the 1800Mhz spectrum, and will run both that range and its existing 850Mhz HSPA+ technology on its network at the same time, with users able to switch between them.

However, speaking in Sydney today about its own 4G initiative, several of Telstra’s key executives this morning appeared keen to emphasis the ability of the new technology to free up capacity on its flagship Next G network for everyone, rather than just boosting top-line speeds. Mike Wright, Telstra’s executive director of Networks & Access Technologies (Wireless) told journalists the overarching theme at the conference had been the need to manage the demand for mobile bandwidth — with mobile data usage typically doubling “every 12 months”, telcos were struggling to cope.

Continue…