Telstra presentation at Comms Day Congress in October 2014 shows the huge change over the past 10 years in mobile network utilisation. 10 years ago the networks had 18 million subscriptions 98% of which were 2G CDMA and GSM/GPRS. 3G using WCDMA had been launched by 3 in April 2003 and was only available in capital cities. The Telstra network load in 2004 was 97% voice and 3% data.
10 years on as data has grown 120% p.a. data carried has increased 3,000 times and now represents 96% of the network load. Where data speeds in 2004 peaked at 160Kbps for CDMA 1XRTT, 50 Kbps for GPRS and, 384 Kbps for WCDMA in 2014 LTE offers peak speeds of 150 Mbps with widely availble LTE category 4 devices and if you are in the right place with the category 6 Samsung Galaxy Note 4 which supports LTE Advanced Category 6 speeds up to 300 Mbps.
Of course if you want to go back another 10 years to 1994 then 93% of the mobiles were AMPS 1G voice and SMS only devices and there were just 1.7 million mobiles in use. So in the 10 years from 1994 to 2004 mobile services grew over ten fold.
Telstra went on to mention in their presentation 700/1800 MHz LTE Advanced (they term 4GX) deployment in Perth, Sydney, Adelaide and Darwin CBDs, and in some regional towns. They , like Optus plan for rapid switch on of 700MHz from 1st January when the spectrum license officially starts. Telstra says it will provide 700 MHz 4GX coverage to a three kilometre radius of all capital city CBDs and 50 regional locations at 1 January and to 90% of the Australian population by the end of January 2015. With the most popular mobiles like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 supporting the APT 700MHz LTE band 28 Telstra expects to have over one million devices in its fleet ready to take advantage of the deeper and broader coverage and faster speeds offered by 4GX by the end of 2014.
The Telstra presentation is here.
Optus like Telstra is working hard to bring their 700MHz LTE Band 28 spectrum into use. They have the dual incentives to improve their depth of coverage in established 4G areas and to allow them to offer 4G service in regional areas where presently they don’t hold 1800MHz licenses. Optus also has launched LTE in 40 regional centres using 2600MHz spectrum 2X20MHz of which it acquired in the May 2013 4G spectrum auction. This 2600MHz spectrum became available in September 2014 and its use allows Optus to selectively introduce 4G ahead of availability of 700MHz in January 2015. Optus plans to have 4G in all capital cities and 100 regional towns in January 2015 and to provide 4G to 90% of the population by April 2015.
Vodafone is rolling out dual band LTE A using its existing 1800 MHz and re-farmed 850MHz spectrum with a focus on major metropolitan markets. It terms this network upgrade 4G+. Vodafone said in July 2014 that it planned to have 4G available to 95% of metropolitan population by the end of 2014. This would be circa 75% of total population coverage. Vodafone has the advantage by using 850 and 1800MHz LTE that the vast majority of its 2 million 4G customers have devices which will work today in these bands.