This Week’s Biggest NBN And Telco News: 1000Mbps 4G, And 5G On The Horizon

Here’s where we round up all the Aussie news around the ‘net about the ‘net, every week. Check in here for a quick primer on everything from piracy to privacy to data retention and the NBN.

Internet image via Shutterstock

This week:


Telstra Will Have 1000Mbps 4G In Australia This Year
Telstra will upgrade its 4GX mobile network in capital cities around Australia to support the LTE Category 16 standard this year, and plans to release the world’s first 4G mobile broadband hotspot capable of 1Gbps download speeds in partnership with Netgear. In tests it has already run in real-world settings, the telco has seen download speeds north of 800Mbps. Your 4G is going to get fast.

Telstra switched on its Category 9 and Category 11 carrier aggregation technologies across densely populated towers in the CBD areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane late last year, and released the Wi-Fi 4G Advanced III hotspot to enable download speeds of 600Mbps. As well as the Samsung Galaxy Note 5, that hotspot was the fastest device both in Australia and, at the time, around the world.


elstra Is Spending Millions To Develop Australia’s 5G Mobile Networks
Australia’s 4G networks are only getting faster. But it’s the future beyond 4G that equally concerns Telstra, so it’s playing an active role in ensuring that the next big leap forward in mobile networking is one that suits Australia and Telstra’s Australian customers — and it’s spending money to do so.

Telstra is set to be a key player in the shaping of the 5G network standard — to the point that it’s even sending over senior engineering staff to the Ericsson research lab in Sweden to collaborate and collect data on which 5G radio spectra would be best for Australia’s vast geography and unique network layout, with our city/country split necessitating both extremely high-bandwidth networks that also need to travel a very long distance.


Internode Now Has Just One 1000GB Naked Plan… That Comes With A Catch

In December last year, Internode switched from a tiered plan structure to a single option for its naked broadband offering — 1000GB for $69.99. While a massive shift from Internode’s modus operandi, it syncs with quasi-owner iiNet’s plans, so no real surprises there. However, current Internode users looking to change their plans, it does come with a caveat — all content is metered.

That’s right, the new naked plan is excluded from Internode’s list of unmetered content, so all your Netflix, Steam, iview and SourceForge data will count towards your downloads. Note that Internode’s regular broadband plans and all grandfathered naked plans don’t have this restriction.


Foxtel Announces Unlimited Broadband Bundles
After 12 months of offering broadband and home phone bundles, Foxtel today announced the launch of its new Unlimited broadband and home phone bundles.

“With the number of internet enabled devices in each home on the rise, coupled with a proliferation of data intensive activities like video streaming, Australian consumers are demanding more from their broadband service than ever before,” Foxtel announced in a statement. “Foxtel’s new unlimited broadband data plans are designed to meet this demand and eliminate household concerns over exceeding monthly data caps.”


NBN’s Cable Network Upgrades Could Increase Speeds To 21Gbps
Video: Cable broadband has been around for a long time, and with its adoption as a significant part of the multi-technology mix National Broadband Network, it’ll be around for a longer time still. The technology behind cable has long given us download speeds of roughly 100Mbps, but a new technology could increase that by up to 20 times.

A new project at CableLabs shows the potential of a Full Duplex version of DOCSIS 3.1, the technology that NBN is committed to rolling out as part of its ongoing upgrades to Australia’s existing cable networks previously run by Telstra and Optus. The technology can run at a maximum of 21Gbps downstream and 10Gbps upstream, putting it on par with the top-end speeds we’ve seen from the best current real-world iterations of fibre to the node.


Jamie Oliver’s Website Is Geoblocking Recipes
No, not videos of recipes. Actual, legit, words-and-pictures recipes. Reddit user fearflavoured made the discovery while trying to look up the recipe for Jamie’s “Sizzling Steak Stir Fry”, only to be greeted with a message saying he couldn’t.

The recipe isn’t available in our country. A recipe. I don’t quite understand the reasoning here. Does it contain ingredients that are frustratingly hard to locate outside of certain regions? Something just doesn’t seem right about this. C’mon, Jamie — let us cook your grub!


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