Operators all around the world are either testing LTE, rolling it out, or have it already running. Sweden was the first country in the world to get an LTE network, all the way back in December 2009, courtesy of local operator TeliaSonera. The new wireless technology promises speeds of around 100 Mbps and ultra low latencies, and now that most of the kinks have been ironed out it’s time to run some benchmarks and find out who makes the fastest gear. TeliaSonera built their high speed network in Stockholm using infrastructure equipment from Swedish giant Ericsson, whereas in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, they went with gear from Nokia Siemens Networks. Operators often use multiple vendors to see just how interoperable the equipment is, and to make suppliers compete on price. Signals Research, an independent group of analysts, traveled to both cities and used up about 600 GB of data over the course of 5.5 days and here’s what they discovered:
Gothenburg’s network got on average 46% to 49% better average download speeds compared to Stockholm. Around 14% of the data downloads performed in Stockholm occurred at speeds of over 50 Mbps, whereas Gothenburg achieved that minimum speed 31% of the time. The peak theoretical throughput of category 3 LTE (102.05 Mbps) was hit with little effort using NSN’s gear too. Those are impressive figures and operators will take notice of these results when deciding who to throw money at to build their network. Considering T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network is hitting roughly 8 Mbps in real world tests, and Telstra’s dual channel HSPA+ network is getting roughly double that, LTE is shaping up to deliver an order of magnitude more speed compared to 3G technologies.
Whether you want to call it 4G or not, because technically only WiMAX 2 and LTE-Advanced are officially recognized as 4G technologies, by the end of this decade your eyelids are going to be peeled right off when loading websites on your mobile phone. That’s always a good thing.
[Via: Nokia Siemens Networks]