Thursday, August 28, 2008

Mobile broadband future is fast - very fast!

In a demonstration, held in Sydney, Australia on Thursday, Ericsson has demonstrated wireless broadband technology that can transmit data at a remarkable 160Mbps.

The company is siting LTE or Long Term Evolution as a '4G' successor to the 3G cellular, or HSPA, infrastructures currently deployed by all of Australia's mobile carriers. But 160 Mbps is just the beginning. The target is for LTE to hit 1Gbps by 2013.

The company currently has proof of concept products but hopes to deliver on some of these towards the end of next year. In the demo, an engineer was able to show how fast it took to transfer files from a base station to a notebook. A 10MB email attachment downloaded almost in the blink of an eye, and 300MB of attachments was download in just over 10 seconds.

Whilst this is an Antipodean-only venture currently, it does provide a tantalising glimpse of what the future may hold in terms of mobile broadband in the UK.

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