Telstra and Nokia Siemens Networks have conducted groundbreaking trials of Long Term Evolution networks in Australia, successfully achieving peak speeds of 100 Mbps download and 31 Mbps upload over a record-breaking distance of 75 kilometers in regional Victoria.
Performance of that sort helps explain why, after years of wrangling, Telstra has agree to essentially divest itself of its fixed-line network and become a wholesale buyer of capacity to support its fixed-line operations.
Commercial deployments rarely achieve the “hero” performance demonstrated in a lab or a limited field trial. But the Telstra test shows what can be done using LTE, and further illustrates what may be needed in backhaul networks when a single end user can burst up to 100 Mbps in the downstream direction.