Australia's Telstra and Ericsson have reached another milestone in the evolution of LTE with the first successful trial of five-carrier aggregation to achieve close to 1Gbps peak speeds.
The companies aggregated 100 MHz of Telstra's spectrum holdings across five separate 4G channels integrated on Telstra's extensive LTE network.
In a blog post announcing the milestone, Telstra group managing director for networks Mike Wright said end-to-end tests achieved download speeds of over 950Mbps using a specialized field test application, as well as speeds of around 843Mbps over the internet to speedtest.net.
“Many may be aware of the debate some year ago around the technical definition of what 4G should be, with a widely accepted view that 4G should achieve peak speeds in the range of 1 Gbps,” he said.
“In the end the global consensus was that the term 4G could be applied to any LTE technology regardless of peak speed capability, but with LTE now reaching 1Gbps speeds in reality, LTE technology could be argued to be finally moving beyond the 4G barrier. “
Telstra has been a pioneer in the adoption of LTE-Advanced, with its current network offering peak speeds of up to 600 Mbps in limited areas.
Telstra and Ericsson also have a history of collaboration on testing 4G and 5G technology candidates. The companies are jointly involved in a project to to co-develop and trial 5G radio and core network technologies.