At Telstra’s Investor Briefing yesterday Warwick Bray ED Mobile and Wireline gave a picture of Telstra’s mobile network achievements and plans. This is summarised on the chart above. The full presentation pack from the briefing is here.
Bray pointed to mobile network capital expenditure of $1.2Bn in 2012/13 and a plan for the same in 2013/14. He repeated David Thodey’s AGM statement that Telstra would take LTE coverage from 66% in June 2013 to 85% by Christmas – always good to agree with the boss. Also mirroring Thodey’s AGM words Bray said Telstra was selectively deploying carrier agregation in LTE using its refarmed 1800MHz and more recently 900 MHz spectrum. Telstra is sourcing Category 4 (3GPP Release 8) devices for these deployments which could enable speeds up to 150Mbps by aggregating the two spectrum bands.
Bray’s slide points to Telstra’s trialling carrier aggregation with 700 and 1800 MHz spectrum and looking to source LTE Category 6 (3GPP Release 10) devices which can theoretically get to 300 Mbps down and 50Mbps uplink. Of course Telstra (and Optus) don’t get to use the 700 MHz spectrum, which they purchased in May this year until January 2015 so don’t hold your breath for these break neck speeds just yet. Telstra has a focus on pushing the adoption of this particular band of LTE 700MHz spectrum to be used in Australia termed APT700 (Asia Pacific Telecommunity 700MHz or sometimes APAC700) so that mass produced devices will support this band (3GPP band 28). For example the just released iPhone 5S supports the USA 700 MHz bands but not the APT700 Band 28. There is a very good White Paper by Ericsson explaining the adoption status and potential for APT700 on the GSA web site here.
One other interesting initiative on Warrick Bray’s slide is the trial with Ericsson of LTE-B. This is broadcast LTE which is based on 3GPP eMBMS (evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services). It allows the same content to be sent to multiple devices in the process relieving network capacity for symultaneous streaming of video for example. Telstra had originally announced this trial with Ericsson in February this year. Mike Wright from Telstra provides some more insight into this in an item reported in the Australian here.