T-Mobile has been performing a few real world LTE tests in Vienna, Austria (not the city of Fucking, Austria) to get a better idea of what the technology is capable of. It’s one thing to setup a single LTE tower and then be the only one connected to it, giving you ungodly results of over 170 megabits per second, but what about the real world? Towers are often interfering with each other, and that degrades performance, not to mention there is usually more than one person connected to a tower at a given time, unless you live in the forest or something. With 20 LTE towers setup, using the 2.6 GHz frequency, a downlink speed of 35 megabits/sec (4.37 megabytes/sec) and an uplink speed of 31 megabits/sec (3.88 megabytes/sec) was achieved, all while being able to ping a server setup at T-Mobile’s headquarters in only 21 milliseconds compared to an HSPA network where it is over 100 ms. This was done using a 20 MHz wide carrier, unlike the current 5 MHz wide carrier used today in HSPA networks. If we do some simple maths, that would mean if operators simply upgraded their HSPA equipment to LTE equipment today, we can expect 8.75 megabits down (1.09 megabytes/sec) and 7.75 megabits up (0.97 megabytes/sec), all while still enjoying that deliciously low ping time.
Now before you start drooling, let me remind you that LTE is a long ways off from launching, and even when it does it is going to be an even longer ways off until you’re going to have a mobile phone with an LTE radio inside. The first LTE devices will most likely be USB dongles hanging off laptops. A Nokia N/Eseries device or an iPhone with LTE is easily a 2012 thing. Start saving your pennies because it isn’t going to be cheap.
[Via: Wireless Moves]