Telekom Austria looks to LTE to divert data flood

Telekom Austria announced Wednesday that it has successfully run a Long Term Evolution (LTE) trial, showcasing a high definition videoconferencing platform in Vienna.

Telekom said technical engineers on in a bus in Vienna´s 21st District made LTE calls to their counterparts in the provincial capitals of Graz, Klagenfurt, Linz, Salzburg and Innsbruck using a telepresence videoconfering system, which supports life-size images with an ultra-high-definition video signal.

The Austrian carrier said the Huawei supplied LTE transmitters currently cover only a few test areas in Vienna´s 2nd and 21st districts and in St. Pölten in Lower Austria. The LTE transmitters as well as nearly 1,000 further base stations are connected via high-performance fibre. Starent/Cisco supplied the evolved packet core, Blueslice supplied the home subscriber server, and Kapsch CarrierCom supplied the integration of the back-end components.

Telekom said that the LTE trial will sit alongside HSPA+ and the company’s fixed net infrastructure to help the company effectively work with an increased surge in traffic volumes and multimedia and data-hungry applications.

Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO of Telekom Austria Group said that the firm’s mobile network has registered a 250-fold increase in its monthly data volumes over the past five years. Meanwhile, mobile broadband customers have reached more than 500,000 subscribers, which represents a seven-fold increase since 2006.

“We expect data volumes to continue to surge going forward,” Ametsreiter said. “Such sharp rises in data traffic will only be able to be managed by combining the latest mobile and fixed net technologies based on so-called air-to-fibre solutions. LTE will meet the significant future capacity requirements of mobile usage. “AirToFiber” enables the transfer of large data volumes most efficiently,” he said.