Huawei, Optus conduct world-first Gigasite trial in Australia

Chinese telecom giant Huawei announced on Friday that the company and Optus, Australia's second largest telecommunication company, have completed a world- first technology trial combining multiple mobile broadband technologies, hitting aggregate throughput of 2.3 Gbps for a single, live network mobile site.

The Gigasite trial combined Optus' spectrum assets across seven frequency bands and utilized a combination of 2G, 3G, and 4G (TDD- LTE and FDD-LTE) technologies to produce the record-breaking aggregate download speeds.

"Our Gigasite trial is about demonstrating our network of the future, and understanding the potential of Optus' market-leading metro spectrum assets. The trial has shown Optus will very soon have the potential capacity to provide increasingly data hungry mobile customers with a faster, more consistent network experience, " Andrew Smith, Optus' Vice President of Mobile Engineering, said.

"The Gigasite trial was a breakthrough in combining spectrum bands and mobile technologies to successfully hit never-seen- before aggregate download speeds," Huawei Australia CTO Peter Rossi said.

"Huawei was able to leverage Optus' huge amount spectrum capacity for the trial, the technological equivalent of having a hundred-lane freeway to race on."

Optus' large amount of spectrum capacity allowed for the unprecedented throughputs in the multi-technology trial, conducted in the field at a site in Lambton, Newcastle, New South Wales.

The trial combined spectrum from the 700MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz, 2100MHz, 2300MHz, 2600MHz, and 3500MHz bands, using a total of 286. 8MHz of spectrum. The trial was also a breakthrough for combining different mobile broadband technologies across the spectrum bands, including HSPA+ (High Speed Packet Access Plus) in the 900MHz band, HSPA+ Dual-Carrier in the 2100MHz band, FDD-LTE in the 700MHz, 1800MHz and 2600MHz bands, and TDD-LTE in 2300MHz and 3500MHz.

Optus announced in January that it had been granted trial licenses for 4G in the 700MHz "digital dividend" and 2600MHz bands, which were utilized in the Gigasite trial.

In another first, Huawei and Optus successfully conducted Australia's first 3500MHz TDD-LTE call in the early stages of the Gigasite trial.