Cautious Telstra chooses LTE trial partners

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Cautious Telstra chooses LTE trial partners

But remains cautious about commercial roll-out, focusing it efforts on HSPA+

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 18 March, 2010

READ MORE: Spectrum | Australia | Telstra Corporation | Broadband | LTE

Australia's Telstra is the biggest flagwaver for HSPA+ and sees LTE as a technology to be kept just for high demand hotzones, at least for the next four years or so. However, that cautious approach is not preventing it from trialling the new system, and it has selected three vendors to help it - Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens.

The firm will start trials in May, in the 1.8GHz and 2.6GHz bands, mainly to understand how LTE would work alongside its HSPA+ network. It is upgrading that system to its 42.2Mbps iteration this year and pushing towards peak data rates of 84Mbps and beyond (involving a combination of dual carrier and MIMO technology). But from late 2011 it expects to have some additional spectrum and to use LTE at least for some hotzone deployments in urban areas of particularly high demand.

That would require close interworking between the LTE zones and the wide area coverage of the existing HSPA-based NextG offering. Acting COO Michael Rocca said it was important to understand how the two networks will coexist, and what the real capabilities of LTE would be as a next generation for NextG. "It will be an important evolution for the NextG network in due course because it will give consumers access to higher speeds while giving Telstra the capacity to serve an increasing number of customers and applications," he said in a statement.

Telstra will run tests from May until as late as November, testing the feasibility and technical capability of LTE. There will also be tests of its potential for rural coverage, especially if digital dividend spectrum is released in the near future, although Telstra is already well placed for rural coverage with its national 850MHz networks. Bringing broadband access to the under-populated outback is a key priority for the Australian government, though its National Broadband Network scheme has been revised and delayed several times amid political debate. Telstra will be able to draw on the experience of its Hong Kong subsidiary CSL, which is already testing LTE alongside its HSPA+ networks.

However, CSL will have very different requirements, given the contrast in terrain and demographics. It is relying heavily on software configurable base stations for flexible upgrade paths and is using equipment from ZTE, which has not secured a place in the Telstra trial (perhaps because the Australian firm can learn about ZTE's offering via its subsidiary).

Instead, the big three in the world of LTE trials by GSM carriers have succeeded again. Ericsson and Huawei have been a double act in virtually all the European trials so far, and both have commercial deals in Scandinavia too, but NSN, after a slow start, is making its presence felt as well. It recently muscled into the roll-out by TeliaSonera, the only carrier with commercial LTE services to date, gaining part of the contract at its second stage. NSN has even said it remains confident of securing a share in the Verizon Wireless deal eventually, during a later stage of build-out (it does have the IMS portion of the contract, but the RAN is being supplied by Ericsson and incumbent Alcatel-Lucent). At Telstra, Ericsson is the supplier of the W-CDMA and HSPA+ systems.

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