Ericsson and Australian operator Telstra have reached what they described as a key milestone in the development of the LTE standard by hitting record download speeds of up to 1 Gbps on a commercial mobile network. In a live test, the companies aggregated 100MHz of Telstra's spectrum holdings across five separate 4G channels to achieve downlink speeds in excess of 950 Mbps, as measured by the UDP speed test application. In a blog post, Telstra said the 100MHz of spectrum was aggregated across the 700MHz, 1800MHz, 2100MHz, and 2600MHz (2x 20MHz) bands, and delivered to a Cobham Aeroflex TM500 mobile device. “With LTE now reaching 1 Gbps speeds in reality, LTE technology could be argued to be finally moving beyond the 4G barrier,” said Mark Wright, Telstra's group managing director of networks, adding that "the days of commercial 1 Gbps services in the market are coming."
Currently, Telstra offers its customers speeds of up to 450 Mbps on compatible handsets and 600 Mbps on a mobile hotspot. Its LTE network covers around 94 percent of the Australian population, to be extended to 99 percent of the population by June 2017 thanks to an AUD 5 billion investment in its mobile network.
