It was only about four months ago when CSL, Telstra's part-owned operator behind Hong Kong's one2Free and 1010 networks, showed off its 150Mbps LTE Cat 4 upgrade; but why stop there?
Today, the same company gave us a glimpse of its upcoming 300Mbps LTE Advanced service, which is enabled by aggregating its 20MHz carriers at both its 1,800MHz and 2,600MHz LTE bands.
"The announcements in Korea and the announcements in Australia around LTE Advanced... the theoretical speed that they're delivering is 150Mbps. What we're talking about today is LTE-A300," said Phil Mottram, CEO of CSL.
"It's definitely a first for Hong Kong, and it's potentially a world-first in terms of being able to deliver these theoretical, maximum download speeds at 300Mbps."
Photo: Since no current devices are equipped with LTE Cat 6 radio, CSL and ZTE used a large device emulator -- with four thick antennas for LTE Cat 6's MIMO 2x2 implementation -- to perform the speedy demo at a small cell site.
Indeed, we witnessed a local download speed reaching just below 300Mbps, while a more realistic FTP download worked out to be about 172Mbps fast, which is still above CSL's current maximum speed. We didn't get to see an upload speed demo, but according to CSL's presentation, it's capped at a comparatively tame 50Mbps.
For those interested, the reason why LTE Cat 5 (which can also do 300Mbps download) is skipped by CSL plus many other companies is because it uses MIMO 4x4, which makes stuffing all these antennas on mobile devices extremely difficult.
CSL won't be offering its 300Mbps service until early 2014, and even then, the operator will only have 4G dongles and USB modems to begin with.
CTO Christian Daigneault said one of the main reasons is that he's waiting for better battery and power management technologies, as CSL's 20+20 carrier aggregation requires more power. In comparison, Korea's current 10+10 implementation (but is still LTE Advanced) is less demanding.
If all goes well, CSL will eventually stock LTE Cat 6-capable smartphones by mid-2014, with Samsung, ZTE and Huawei namechecked as potential device partners.
Note: LTE Isa trademark of ETSI
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