Not to be left behind in network speed bragging rights Optus yesterday announced it has achieved 480Mbps over its lab network at Macquarie Park in Sydney and at its “Gigasite” at Lambton in Newcastle. The 480 Gbps was achieved by LTE Carrier Aggregation (LTE-CA) using four 20MHz channels. Tay Soo Singtel’s CTO said that they used three TDD channels and one FDD in the trial along with a prototype Category 8 device.
Using 4X4 MIMO and only 2X20MHz of 2.3 GHz TDD spectrum Tay said that Optus was able to achieve 418Mbps in Macquarie Park indoors and 350Mbps outdoors in Newcastle.
Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access e-UTRA is the air interface standard of 3GPP’s Long Term Evolution (LTE). The standard provides for peak download rates of 299.6 Mbit/s for 4×4 antennas, and 150.8 Mbit/s for 2×2 antennas with 20 MHz of spectrum. LTE Advanced supports up to 8×8 MIMO antenna configurations with peak download rates of 2,998.6 Mbit/s in an aggregated 100 MHz channel. As such there is still room to up the bragging rights in the future. It will be a question of how much spectrum the operator has and how many MIMO layers are practical.
