Optus has had 4G LTE testing sites in New South Wales for a while now, experimenting with network capacity and throughput to multiple devices. With 4G technology advancing and speeds increasing, telcos have to keep adding new hardware and tweaking it to provide maximum performance to their customers. Optus’ latest network test has turned up some impressive numbers.
Two ‘gigasites’, as Optus has dubbed them, are already set up and running in St Mary’s in Sydney’s wset and Lambton in Newcastle. 21 company engineers stress-tested the gigasite’s mobile network to its limits using 58 smartphones and mobile dongles and 31 laptops, and managed to achieve a full 2.32Gbps of data throughput over every possible frequency.
Lots of Samsung and LG smartphones were used for the testing, as the picture above shows; it’s likely that plenty of Huawei equipment was in use as well, since Huawei and Nokia Networks and Solutions (NSN) helped Optus configure the gigasites’ telecommunications infrastructure.
Every mobile frequency spectrum segment from 2G to 4G was put to use in the gigasite test, including a 3500MHz band that Optus is considering for use in a future mobile network. The fastest of the bands was the 2300Mhz 4G segment owned and operated in cities by Optus for its 4G Plus network; this is the same allocation bought by NBN Co for its fixed wireless broadband for rural areas. A single smartphone running on the 2300MHz band managed to pull down data at a blistering 165Mbps — that’s sitting right at the theoretical limit of current single-band 4G technology.