Telstra is switching on gigabit 4G service in the Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane areas in mid-February 2017, with Adelaide and Perth slated to join later in 2017. As Telstra has been doing since 2013, Telstra has been bonding more spectrum to achieve the higher speeds.
Telstra used LTE Advanced carrier aggregation in late 2013 to push peak speeds to 300Mbps, then to 450Mbps in May 2014 and 600Mbps in September 2015.
The latest tweaks provide a peak downlink speed of 1Gbps and peak uplink of 150Mbps.
Telstra has aggregated three 20-MHz carriers to achieve the latest speed increase, and using 4×4 MIMO and 2×2 MIMO, plus 256 quadrature amplitude modulation to reach gigabit speeds.
The obvious issue is what impact gigabit speeds will have on fixed network substitution or enterprise services.
