At Telstra’s AGM CEO David Thodey pointed to substantial growth and investment in Telstra’s mobile business both in Australia and in Hong Kong.
David claimed that Telstra in Australia now had 15.1 million mobile serives an increase of 1.257 million in the past 12 months. Figures for Hong Kong where Telstra’s CSL has 1010, One2Free and New World mobile services increased by 425,000. CSL has 4.2 of Hong Kong’s 16.7 million mobiles.
Thodey said that Telstra had invested $1.2Bn in its mobile network last financial year and would invest the same amount in 2013/14 year. In addition Telstra had spent $0.8Bn to renew existing spectrum licenses (mainly for their 850 and 1800 MHz spectrum) and $1.3Bn for new 4G spectrum (700 and 2600MHz).
David Thodey said that Telstra now had 3.2 million 4G devices on its network and would extend the reach of 4G from the current 66% of the population to 85% by Christmas 2013 maintaining, he said, Telstra’s lead in mobile speed and coverage. On 4G speed Thodey referred to trials of LTE Advanced (3GPP Release 10) on the Sunshine Coast which by combining (Carrier Aggregation) 1800 and 900 MHz spectrum was able to achieve real world speeds of 90 to 180 Mbps.
Thodey said Telstra is now working to rollout 900MHz spectrum aggregated with their existing 1800MHz on the 4G LTE network. This 900MHz spectrum has been refarmed from the Telstra GSM network which today is only lightly loaded as customers have migrated to 4G.
Both Optus and Vodafone have also refarmed 900MHz spectrum but both have used this in their 3G networks. With spectrum efficiency nearly three times higher with LTE 4G compared to WCDMA/HSPA 3G Telstra is looking to get the maximum benefit from this valuable low banded 900MHz spectrum in advance of the availability of the 700MHz 4G spectrum which will be able to be used from January 2015.
You can see the webcast of the CEO’s presentation at the AGM at here.