Telstra tests incredibly fast Gigabit LTE mobile network

TELSTRA has tested the world’s first Gigabit LTE network capable of unprecedented mobile broadband speeds.

The telco wowed media and industry members in Sydney today when it tested the network and unveiled a new router to let customers tap into the incredible speeds.

In partnership with Netgear, chip maker Qualcomm and infrastructure provider Ericsson, the Telstra network will allow its customers to receive downloads speeds of 1Gpbs and upload speeds of 150Mbps over its 4G LTE network.

Netgear also launched the world’s first Gigabit LTE device, the Nighthawk M1 mobile router.

In a demonstration for assembled media, a computer was connected to Gigabit LTE and performed several tests on speedtest.net, reaching speeds of 900Mbps.

Link

Considering Australia's current poor internet speed ranking, this is welcome news for those of us who were awaiting the arrival of the debacle that is the NBN. For most people living in Australia this is welcome news. An upfront (one-off) cost of $360 for the modem itself, while certainly not cheap, is within reach for most people that can already afford home internet access.

While I'm not big fan of Telstra, I still think this is exciting news and eagerly await it's implementation into the mainstream market. And as somebody who is currently using ADSL2+ but only receiving speeds of under 4Mbps, this would be a tremendous upgrade — if the average speed ends up being relatively close to what they are promoting, that is.

Do you share my optimism after reading the article?

originally posted by: Dark Ghost
Do you share my optimism after reading the article?

I am told that every provider of copper connections is out to be done with that forever, and they see their future in a sort of super-high throughput LTE network.

However, they also would really like to give you tiny caps and charge out the rump for an actual bit of usage. Has Telstra unveiled their bandwidth caps for this yet? I suspect not.

I share your problem when I'm at home with being on ADSL on really long drops, it's nice to have it but it's not as nice as my nephew who lives in town and has several hundred megabits. Still, 24 is not a bad number considering I'm over a mile from my fiber interface. At least they're trying. But what they'd like is to force me onto wireless. The only problem is, when you're as far in the boonies as I am, both houses, you're lucky to have two bars. I'd be back to sub 1Mbps, and they have no intention of ever building towers that way. So I'm hoping they never manage to force this no-copper thing.

a reply to: Bedlam

I never thought of it like that, thanks for your input.

My friend was living outside of town and ask me to help him so he would be able to watch news from Norway.
We was in Turkey and on cloudy days his dish was too small so i turned it towards my spare dish downtown and
by replacing the LNB with a USB wifi dongle he got it from me instead.
I even used this trick getting internett in my sailboat from home.
It dos not need to be a satdish, put the wifi dongle in the bottom of a tin can and check yourself.
remember the router must have a external antenna.
With today's repeater tec and a reflector i guess it will work as far as your eye can see.

originally posted by: Dark Ghost
a reply to: Bedlam

I never thought of it like that, thanks for your input.

It's an urban vs rural thing. Like me in the southeast US, you are probably NOT in an urban area in Australia, and like me, probably have very long copper pairs to your nearest fiber connection. It's a combo for poor throughput, but at least the caps are large (comparatively). I bitched and carped and pulled strings and got them to pull two new good line pairs that mile from my box and had them bond it all together for a 24MB connection. But before that, I wasn't able to get better than 3 or 4. Still, it was better than satellite data because they have tiny caps and draconian overage.

The new super wireless services are going to be a revenue bonanza for them because they intend to make their money stream on data penalties. And that's going to be ok in town, but out in the sticks where I am, there's nothing but secondary and tertiary roads and a very low pop density, so it doesn't make a good business case for them to put in a tower that would give us good numbers and a decent data rate. So we'll never get a sniff of it. Luckily Verizon did finally drop towers in places that serve the sticks areas of both homes, but with just enough to get you a good phone connection. I'm ok with that, but I'm not expecting to ever see the dawn of the wireless jubilee.

And I'm stuck paying Time Warner Cable $45 a month for a miserable 30 mbps landline.

You know what I would love to see? Cheap gigabit satellite internet. This would so completely upset the landline monopolies that it would drive some of them out of business. They totally deserve it too. I wish I could kick the CEO and stockholders of TWC in the nuts until they go impotent.

originally posted by: peskyhumans
Cheap gigabit satellite internet.

The latency is painful. And it's a pretty constrained pipe, so you pay, and pay big, for payload.

eta: We have a better idea, and it might work, but it'll take a snappy business case to pay for, and I'll have to be home. Which means it won't get done unless I solve this pesky logic issue I'm working on. Alas.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: peskyhumans
Cheap gigabit satellite internet.

The latency is painful. And it's a pretty constrained pipe, so you pay, and pay big, for payload.

eta: We have a better idea, and it might work, but it'll take a snappy business case to pay for, and I'll have to be home. Which means it won't get done unless I solve this pesky logic issue I'm working on. Alas.

Yes that's how things are now. Satellite internet really sucks right now. However people much smarter than I am might be able to come up with a way to improve things.

Interesting article

^ So this scientist figured out a way to force radio waves to travel faster than light, which apparently doesn't violate the laws of physics because radio waves have no mass.

Even if that's not something that could help, there could be other ways of making radio communication better.

NASA has been testing laser communication. The only problem with that is you need direct line of sight with the satellite. A cloudy day would mean no internet.

originally posted by: peskyhumans
^ So this scientist figured out a way to force radio waves to travel faster than light, which apparently doesn't violate the laws of physics because radio waves have no mass.

Oh, that. True that radio waves have no mass, but they have a rate at which they can push through unaltered vacuum, because the values for permeability and permittivity in vacuum are not zero. This is a weird issue in many OTHER ways, but this particular scientist is having issues with picking out situations that involve group velocity and those defined by phase velocity. Which is odd, since you get that in modern physics I.

In short, if I have a magic laser, and I sweep the beam across a cloudy sky by grabbing the thing and yanking, the beam's spot on the clouds may traverse the sky faster than light. Yet, no part of the beam goes faster than light. That's the problem this guy seems to have. He's got a phase velocity he's looking at, not a group. So it's a sort of mirage, the sort you're trained to spot early on.

You will get exactly the same latency with a laser comm sat as a radio one. There are other benefits that aren't apparent involving using them to communicate with subs.

However, I do think you can invoke a laser to do some high speed relay work, without aiming it point to point. Exactly. Maybe. It'll take some fiddling with.

Maybe, just maybe you could do it straight up. And maybe if you can't, you can invoke the sub trick. Sort of. If you could get away with it.

Untill we have the unlimited data days back what is the point in having gigabit speeds on our phones? A monthly data allowance will be gone in a 10th of a second when you got full speed!

originally posted by: kamatty
Untill we have the unlimited data days back what is the point in having gigabit speeds on our phones? A monthly data allowance will be gone in a 10th of a second when you got full speed!

And there you have the very heart of their new profit center.

For just a SMALL fee, I'm quite certain that Telstra will sell you some more data. With smiles on their faces.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: kamatty
Untill we have the unlimited data days back what is the point in having gigabit speeds on our phones? A monthly data allowance will be gone in a 10th of a second when you got full speed!

And there you have the very heart of their new profit center.

For just a SMALL fee, I'm quite certain that Telstra will sell you some more data. With smiles on their faces.

Or charge per MB after you've gone over your quota as iiNet do with my 4G.

and Uploads are counted in the total Quota also, so they get paid for both me downloading, and me sending. Double dipping at it's finest....

All the copper here will be done away with this year, we're forced to go onto the NBN for both Phone and Internet access. Currently, I have a 500GB quota on ADLS2+ syncing at between 7mbps and 13mbps depending on god knows what factors... and I'm 2.6km from the exchange. I pay $59 a month for this.

I will be forced to pay $79 a month on the NBN for a max sync speed of 12mbps and be reduced to 250GB quota. Plus the installation of new gear at the front of the house, that will not operate in a power outage unless I pay more for a battery backup. So I lose emergency landline phone service should something happen.

And this is progress here... lmfao... :/

originally posted by: savemebarry
So I lose emergency landline phone service should something happen.

An issue for me, as well, we kept a landline phone until it got to be so bad there wasn't any point - I'm not saying they intentionally broke the thing but while you ALWAYS had ADSL, the voice phone didn't last a week before it went out AGAIN.

So we swapped over the alarm system to Verizon cell phone and changed the family cell plan to Verizon which had 2 bars from AT&T, which had none. Also have a drop phone that's tied to CSpire which uses a different physical tower and gets two bars if you stand just right.

Told the guys at AT&T if they wanted to run fiber to my house I'd be more than happy to get rid of the copper. I think I'm lucky I could pry a new set of lines out of them for 24MBps.

originally posted by: peskyhumans
And I'm stuck paying Time Warner Cable $45 a month for a miserable 30 mbps landline.

You know what I would love to see? Cheap gigabit satellite internet. This would so completely upset the landline monopolies that it would drive some of them out of business. They totally deserve it too. I wish I could kick the CEO and stockholders of TWC in the nuts until they go impotent.

TWC has been rebranding to Spectra due to the corporate merger a couple months back. They won't switch you over to the new plans unless you speak to them specifically about it, but if they've gone to Spectra they'll have new speed tiers. Just this past Monday actually I got a new plan (they rebranded here last week). I went from $75/month for 10 down/1 up to $60/month for 60 down/5 up. You may want to look into it when they change in your area.

Really though, wired connections are losing the battle. Wireless is taking over everything, especially in rural areas like Australia or most of the US and with wireless comes much more restrictive bandwidth caps, courtesy of the FCC and their "hybrid plan" a few years back.

originally posted by: Bedlam
So we swapped over the alarm system to Verizon cell phone and changed the family cell plan to Verizon which had 2 bars from AT&T, which had none. Also have a drop phone that's tied to CSpire which uses a different physical tower and gets two bars if you stand just right.

Wireless in my town is really, really bad. There's near zero AT&T reception and barely any Verizon. It's actually so bad that when I got an alarm system I had to get one of those cell signal boosters that runs off my wired internet connection. That's the only way the tower could make contact with the alarm company.

Telstra, pffffffffffffffft !!

Telstra is the provider for my internet, it is terrible. Even after buying the new State of the art Router, i get almost 2MB download speeds and 0.15MB upload speeds.

Definately not getting what i pay for per month.

I use 4.5 LTE on my Android while with Turkcell Network in istanbul and the speed is excellent .

4300 odd satellites in orbit as of 2016 ; still no full coverage .

What if the sound wave patterns were used in the transmit of high speed data ?

originally posted by: 23432

What if the sound wave patterns were used in the transmit of high speed data ?

What sort of sound wave patterns? Over the phone?

I use LTE now in rural PA..

Beats the 1MB/s speed the DSL.... no cable..

I get 25-40Mbps from AT&T currently using a dedicated LTE router.

a reply to: Throes

What's your cap?

originally posted by: 23432
What if the sound wave patterns were used in the transmit of high speed data ?

One of these?