Telstra achieves 450 Mbps with LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation

Telstra has achieved a world first on its mobile network by demonstrating live network speeds of 450 Mbps using LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation across a trial combination of 1800 and 2600 MHz bands.

These speeds, achieved in testing, are three times faster than the theoretical peak network speeds that Telstra or any other telco in Australia offers on 4G today.

Telstra worked with Ericsson to install equipment for two new 4G frequency division duplexing (FDD) channels of 20 MHz bandwidth each on the 2600 MHz spectrum band (40 MHz FDD), aggregated with our live 20 MHz of 4G on the 1800 MHz band. The result was three simultaneous side-by-side paths for the data to travel through to the operational core network.

Telstra also used an advanced prototype Cat 9 engineering device that could combine the three channels to achieve these speeds.

Telstra says that, while the typical speeds achievable at a commercial level will be lower in practice and while individual users may not consume all of this bandwidth, the ability to effectively triple the typical user speeds possible on Telstra’s 4G service today means it can carry a huge amount of future traffic demand shared across many users.