- Jan 5, 2011
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It looks like the U.S. and Europe are now playing catch-up when it comes to faster wireless internet speeds. Several new Asian markets have started popping up sporting the newer LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation method. This type of LTE-Advanced combines two levels of electromagnetic spectrum into one to offer greater speeds.
The newest market to start firing up a faster network is Telstra in Australia. They join SK Telecom, which was the first to rollout this technology. Telstra LTE-Advanced brings wireless download speeds of up to 150Mbps by combining their 900 MHz spectrum and their 1800 MHz airwaves. Additionally, they can splice more spectrum into this later on to achieve 300Mbps (for this type of LTE-Advanced). This is about four times faster than anything in the U.S. and three times faster than Europe and Canada.
Luckily, the companies in Europe and North America aren't too far behind. T-Mobile and Verizon are already planning to launch their first LTE-Advanced networks within the coming months, and within the next three years all the major U.S. carriers will be offering some version of carrier aggregated LTE-Advanced. Also, although carriers in Europe are a bit farther behind, when they do start to roll it out, it shouldn't take too long because they are sitting on a great deal of spectrum they can combine all at once.
It will definitely be interesting to see how these faster speeds translate into real-world performance on our smart devices.
Source: GigaOM
