Strewth mate! Telstra launches eye-watering gigabit LTE across Australia

Crack open a VB and chuck another shrimp on the barbie, because Telstra has only gone and launched gigabit LTE across Aussie cities. Stone the flaming crows!

Lte Speeds Fast Enough To Stop A Eucalyptus-Munching Koala In Its Tracks. (Also, Anyone Else Notice The Cat Under His Nose?)

In a move that’s set to get Aussies hearts racing faster than a brumby bush bash, Telstra conducted a whole bunch of live network tests in the big smoke (Sydney), in which it cracked the gigabit barrier for download accompanied by a whopping 150 Mbps upload speed. As standard, partners including Ericsson, Qualcomm and Netgear all fell afoul of horrifically generic statements that accompany these sorts of announcements.

“Gigabit performance will improve access to high-quality video streaming, and facilitate emerging mobile virtual reality applications and experiences, and is a key step towards 5G,” copy-and-pasted Qualcomm in a statement.

Network vendor Netgear donated its Nighthawk M1 router to the project and consumers in Australia will be able to link into gigabit yumminess in about a month. The pant-wettingly fast speeds on offer stem from a whole bunch of spectrum cleverness, including 4X4 MIMO, 3 Carrier Aggregation and higher order modulation (256QAM). The 4-way receive diversity courtesy of Netgear and Qualcomm routers cater for an expanded data throughput capacity across all areas of the LTE network.

Mike Wright, Telstra’s Group MD for Networks reckons it’s all about the future.

“As the roll out of Gigabit LTE continues, our customers with a Gigabit capable device can enjoy a faster mobile experience for both downloads and uploads,” he said. “As our customers continue to use increasing amounts of data for entertainment and business use, Telstra’s continuous innovation ensures our network is ready to deliver the country’s best mobile experience.

“Gigabit LTE is also an important step on our journey to 5G and demonstrates Telstra’s commitment to delivering Australians a world class network now and into the future. We are well placed to evolve our 4G network and are putting the building blocks in place for Australia to be ready for 5G – this will deliver more bandwidth and lower latencies which are critical for emerging applications such as downloading 4K video, IoT, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality and shared virtual reality.”

Obviously IoT was going to be mentioned in there too. They’ve bagged two thirds of the holy trinity of telco buzzwords (5G and IoT), such a pity they didn’t get ‘cloud’ in there too…