Telstra has officially activated Voice over LTE (News - Alert) (VoLTE) services on its Australian 4GX network, according to a recent announcement at the company’s Investor Relations day, although the technology is not yet commercially available. The operator is the second in the country to set forth VoLTE plans following Vodafone’s announcement late last year.
Telstra (News - Alert) is actively working to ensure faster 4G speeds and pave the way for a 5G rollout by the end of the decade. As reported by TechTeam, LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) testing was performed using three carrier aggregation with a 20MHz channel aggregated on the 1800MHz band and two 20MHz channels on the 2600MHz band. These tests yielded peak speeds of 450Mbps, but the company hopes testing on its live commercial network will bring speeds of as much as 600Mbps. For the sake of comparison, Telstra’s current 4GX network offers speeds of 150Mbps based on carrier aggregation across the 1800MHz and 700MHz spectrum bands.
However, upon launch users will need a compatible device to take advantage of these faster speeds, which won’t be available to the public until later in the year; Telstra plans to commercially launch its VoLTE services once there are enough of these devices on the market. The company plans to augment its 4GX network and VoLTE services with Video over LTE (ViLTE), which provides support for multimedia communications over the network. ViLTE is a critical driver of LTE’s continuously rising speeds as the technology grows closer to achieving conventional broadband speeds, and will likely be made available soon after the official launch of VoLTE services.
Telstra is also trialing another new technology — LTE-Broadcast — to address the rising demand for mobile video traffic. Although the technological underpinnings of LTE-Broadcast have not yet been made clear, the service will be activated in several stadiums around Australia to support a comprehensive testing process. The company is collaborating with a few other operators (including U.S. telecom giant Verizon (News - Alert)) to perpetuate the development of LTE-Broadcast and facilitate the future production of devices that are compatible with it.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson