Telstra has today announced their Mobile World Congress news, announcing plans for an upcoming 5G trial at the Commonwealth Games in 2018 on the Gold Coast. They’ve also announced plans to expand and release a range of Ericsson powered services across Australia.
Telstra will activate 5G in parts of the Gold Coast for the Commonwealth Games, which will enable them to perform detailed testing of early 5G standards and use cases. Telstra has been working with Ericsson on building the 5G standard, working up models for radio signals on the proposed 5G spectrum. As parts of their testing they achieved speeds of more than 11Gbps in
Telstra and Ericsson recently began 5G trials at Ericsson’s headquarters, demonstrating speeds of more than 11 Gbps in a ‘complex, real world, indoor setting’ in their labs.
For 2016 though, Telstra has plans to expand existing technology and introduce new features on their network. Parts of the Telstra network in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane will be enabled to support up to 1Gbps in preparation for commercial devices later in 2016 – 2 guess which major phones are to be announced later this year.
Telstra will also be expanding their LTE Broadcast (LTE-B) technology to offer broadcasts of multiple streams within a stadium and beyond, basically expanding what they trialled at ANZ Stadium at last years NRL Grand Final in October last year. Telstra now has LTE-B enabled at over 3,000 4GX sites around regional and Metro Australia, so we should see some exciting results for sports fans in the future.
Another feature coming soon, in fact in the first half of this year, is Voice over Wi-Fi, allowing customers with VoLTE handsets to use their home broadband to carry their voice calls in a seamless hand-off. In the future, Voice over Wi-Fi will transition to Video Calling as well.
Speaking of VoLTE, after rolling out VoLTE in September last year, Telstra will start offering Video over LTE (ViLTE) in the second half of this year. ViLTE will let customers switch from voice to a video call mid-call – the future is coming!
Video over LTE (ViLTE).
Seems as though Telstra has some big plans in 2016, with a number of new ways to use their service that should retain customers looking to use these features. We’ll be checking out these services in Australia as they’re announced and launched.
