Hold the 'fone! Voda hits gigabit LTE in Portugal

While the rest of the telecoms pack talks big about 5G and all that, Vodafone has just supercharged its LTE network to give a good bit’a gigabit.

Telstra might have gone and crammed some mega-sized gigabits through its LTE pipes on the underside of the world, but Voda’s Portuguese operations just smashed through that fabled gigabit barrier to bombard its customers with gargantuan mobile speeds.

Some might argue that having a 1 Gbps connection on your mobile is just straight up unnecessary and self-indulgent, but who could possibly argue that streaming 4K ultra-HD video live on your phone just so you can simultaneously play FIFA 17 on the Playstation without the inconvenience of missing the 12:30 kick off, is unnecessary? Not this correspondent, that’s for true.

Funnily enough, it’s the same guys who made Telstra’s dream come true who have now taken their travelling dream factory around the world to Vodafone’s benefit. Ericsson, Qualcomm and, lest we forget, Netgear make up the mobile dream factory, and they’ll be coming to a mobile network near you soon, folks.

The demonstration, according to Vodafone, transmitted files over to a Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 LTE mobile test device – wirelessly, obviously. But, of course, the only way of helping people realise just how fast this could be is to put it in to some incredibly patronising every day terms.

According to Vodafone, the eye watering gigabit-goodness will let users “open a web page instantly or download a 1GB Ultra HD / 4K video in about ten seconds.”

Lots of cleverness makes the dream come true, like 256QAM modulation – which apparently allows high information transfer rates – as well as 4×4 MIMO and 3 Carrier Aggregation on the download.

But let’s not forget about uplink, guys! While downlink might be the sexy one that gets the pulses racing, uplink is the less attractive but much more intelligent older sister. It’s like being able to download as much as you want in no time whatsoever, but not being able to upload zilch spells the end of the internet as we know it. After all, if people can’t upload cat videos, how are we all going to cope with the relentless nature of reality?

The point of that particular tangent is to say that Vodafone reckons it’ll be able to support 150 Mbps upload. Impressive that, innit?

So, all your Portuguese power-users can look forward to that pretty soon. Although there aren’t any phones that actually support that sort of unlimited power just yet – so the wait continues.

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