Australia’s Telstra has thrown its hat into the speed game, announcing today that it has demonstrated a live network using LTE-Advanced technology with carrier aggregation to produce downlink speeds of 450 megabits per second.
The carrier said the FDD-LTE demonstration, which was run with network partner Ericsson, was conducted using a total of 60 megahertz of spectrum, with two blocks of 20 megahertz of spectrum in the 2.6 GHz band and 20 megahertz in the 1.8 GHz band providing “three simultaneous side-by-side paths for the data to travel through to the operational core network.” The carrier added that it also used a prototype category nine engineering device to combine the three channels.
“Conducting this type of test is a significant step in the network engineering and development process,” explained Mike Wright, group managing director at Telstra, in a statement. “It is essential for us to see how this type of technology works in the live network and understand what needs to be done to continue to absorb the exploding demand in mobile broadband and offer an exceptional customer experience.”
While the test proved successful, Telstra said it will still be a few years before it expects commercial deployments of such a network. At this point commercial plans include the use of 20-megahertz spectrum blocks across the 700 MHz, 1.8 GHz and 2.6 GHz bands.
The Telstra test comes months after South Korea’s SK Telecom showed off its own tri-band carrier aggregation trial that itself provided network speeds reaching 450 Mbps. That trial tapped into the same FDD-LTE carrier aggregation technology using a total of 60 megahertz of spectrum.
Telstra last year said it conducted a dual-band carrier aggregation test using spectrum across its 900 MHz and 1.8 GHz bands.
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