Just prior to World Mobile Congress in Barcelona Telstra made a number of announcements on the evolution of their LTE 4GX network and along with Ericsson Australia NZ’s CEO Håkan Eriksson outlined arrangements which will see Telstra collaborating with Ericsson’s 5G initiatives to “drive the standards, test new concepts and research the new architectures.”
Mike Wright Group Managing Director Networks announced that Telstra would;
- Deploy Category 9 capability on its LTE-Advanced 4GX network in selected capital cities by April 2015. This would allow compatible devices to aggregate up to three 20MHz LTE carriers to achieve peak download speeds up to 450Mbps (with uplink at 50Mbps). The Category 9 devices such as those built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 System on Chip will be available later in 2015.
- Following closed trials including at 2014 Melbourne Cup Telstra will integrate LTE Broadcast LTE-B into its network by May 2015. From then they will progressively enable permanent LTE-B channels at key venues and events leading to customer access to LTE-B later in 2015.
- Enable Voice over LTE (VoLTE) across its network by April 2015 leading to customers with compatible phones of which there are many (see here) being able to benefit from some of the VoLTE improvements and capabilities later in the year. Following the network changes Telstra would also trial Video over LTE (ViLTE) for video calling and voice over WiFI.
- Collaborate with Ericsson on development of 5G standards, participate with Ericsson on its 5G radio test bed in Stockholm in 2015 and later run a 5G field trial locally. They would also work with Ericsson on capabilities of their core network products many announced just prior to WMC here to lead to 5G ready evolved core.
- Telstra and Ericsson will also run a Machine Type Communications (MTC) (3GPP Release 13 planned March 2016) proof of concept with Telstra and selected industry partners. MTC is an enabler of the IoT (Internet of Things) see here for more information.
Full details of the Ericsson/Telstra collaboration are in the press release here .