Australian telecommunications incumbent Telstra has announced that it will begin deploying new 4G technology in high-traffic areas after it demonstrated theoretical peak speeds of 2Gb/s at Ericsson’s lab in Sweden.
The Australian mobile operator has been forced to axe a number of jobs in recent months in an effort to offset its steady decline in profit in recent fiscal quarters. Telstra CEO, Andrew Penn said the National Broadband Network was the main contributing factor in the job cull.
However, Telstra can now announce some good news in the form of these new 4G upgrades after it said that speeds reached on an LTE network aggregating 100MHz of spectrum across various combinations of frequency bands and using 4×4 MIMO technology.
Telstra’s Group MD for networks said the results continue to be very positive and the tests also indicated a prototype Net-gear Nighthawk mobile router in action.
Telstra’s strategic focus will be on target areas such as central business districts, stadiums and shopping centres with the upgraded 4G technology, which it plans to deploy later this year. With the Nighthawk router expected to be available in late 2018, it is gearing up to launch the world’s fastest 4G device.
In addition to this, the prominent executive noted that enhancing the performance of 4G is also an important step forward in the development of 5G.
Wright said for most initial use-cases 5G will not be a standalone technology, which means the quality of the underlying 4G service and how it integrates with 5G will go a long way to determining the overall mobile experience.
Wright added, “As this testing indicates there is still plenty of life left in 4G as we continue to invest in faster speeds and greater capacity on 4G as part of delivering the best mobile experience for our customers.”
