Optus is moving forward with their 4G Plus network, today announcing that they’ve enabled LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation on their 2300MHz TDD LTE-A network around Australia, with Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide users connected to the network the first to see the bump, and Canberra users to follow in the coming weeks.
Carrier Aggregation allows Optus to combine the two 20MHz channels they operate in the 2300Mhz spectrum to offer speeds of up to 220Mbps. While the top speed is nice, you probably won’t quite get that with other users on the network, but Optus has seen speeds of up to 160Mbps in field trials.
Optus is pushing the first to market angle of the announcement, as well as the speed bump, with Vic McClelland, Managing Director of Optus Networks saying:
As the first to launch Carrier Aggregation in Australia on a live commercial network, Optus had proven its commitment to innovate and invest to deliver a great network. Optus was the first to launch TD-LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation in the world, and we are the first to launch this capability on any Australian network. We are future proofing our network in response to consumers’ growing appetite for mobile streaming, browsing and downloading.
The 2300MHz LTE network is already accessible with a range of handsets on the Optus network, handsets such as the LG G3, G2 and F70 as well as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and Note 3. Mr McClelland also took the opportunity today to announce that four more TD-LTE CA devices would be coming in the next couple of months.
Interesting announcement, we all love more speed on our networks, now to hope that Optus offer some higher data caps to make sure we can download more, faster, cheaper.
At 160MBps, that’s fast enough to blow through 2GB of data in just over a minute and a half.
More speed is not worth a whole lot, when the current data allowances are still comprehensively puny, and the data prices are still extremely exorbitant.
Having higher speed is useless if you can’t use it.
More speed is helpful in the sense that it reduces congestion, although there aren’t any handsets that support this now anyway. Perhaps Optus should concentrate on rolling out 700MHz.