Australian operator Telstra reports it has achieved record speeds in a 5G live demo. The operator reached an upload peak rate of 986Mbps. The demo was carried out in partnership with Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies. This speed was achieved by combining the data rates from Telstra’s mid-band and mmWave 5G network spectrum, using Ericsson’s New Radio-Dual Connectivity software feature with uplink four-component Carrier Aggregation and a smartphone form-factor test device powered by Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System.
Telstra also reports it has expanded its 5G this year with more than 4000 sites now in operation. The operator’s 5G network currently covers 240 cities and towns nationally and reaches over 75 percent of the Australian population. Telstra plans to expand its 5G service to reach 95 percent of the Australian population by mid-2025.
Telstra also reports that delivering uplink peak rates of close to 1Gbps will enable it to more than double the current uplink throughput in its 5G network. This will mainly support applications and services that involve uploading vast amounts of data, such as video conferencing, sharing content on social media or streaming vision from smart home cameras.
Technical details
Ericsson, Telstra and Qualcomm Technologies achieved the first on a commercial network in Queensland, Australia with a theoretical maximum uplink speed of 986 Mbps, integrating four component 100MHz carriers of millimeter wave, combining with the 100MHz of 3.6GHz spectrum. NR-DC was implemented with n78 and n258.
The testing was conducted at Telstra’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) using Telstra’s commercial network resulting in a throughput of roughly 1Gbps, more than doubling the current uplink speed on the market. The smartphone form-factor test device powered by Snapdragon X65 was used with Ericsson Radio System’s Baseband 6648 and AIR 6488 for mid-band, which has been widely deployed in Telstra’s network, and Baseband 6648 with the AIR 5322 for high-band.
Ericsson also reports that its NR-DC software combines 5G frequency ranges below 7.125 GHz (mid-band, Time Division Duplex, TDD) and above 24.25 GHz (high-band TDD) and is now available for commercial deployment. The UL 4CC carrier aggregation software is expected to be commercially available in the second quarter of 2022.
