Australians using Telstra’s Next G™ network will be the first in the world to experience peak downlink speeds of 21Mbps by the end of the year.

As the network celebrates its second anniversary, Telstra announced that its planned deployment of Enhanced HSPA (eHSPA) to the Next G™ wireless network is progressing on schedule, as connectivity testing between network infrastructure equipment and cellular device technology was successfully achieved.

Mike Wright, Executive Director Telstra Wireless, attended the world’s first live demonstration of the eHSPA interoperability at Ericsson headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden.

“This is truly game-changing. Telstra has a proven history of investment in Australia’s nation-wide, HSPA-enabled Next G™ network and this is our latest, very important step toward realising this technology,” Mr Wright said. “Practically speaking, our tests have shown that when combined with our planned rollout of Ethernet backhaul, this network will deliver truly high-speed connectivity on the move.”

Telstra's Next G™ wireless network, launched on 6 October 2006, is already the world’s fastest national mobile broadband network, covering 99 per cent of the Australian population. eHSPA, also known as HSPA Evolution or HSPA+, is designed to enhance the mobile broadband user experience and enable a wide range of services. The interoperability test was performed on a wireless infrastructure network solution from Ericsson using Qualcomm’s MDM8200™ product, the industry’s first chipset solution to support eHSPA devices.

“The peak speeds and network efficiency enabled by this evolution will encourage the development of more innovative applications and, importantly, increase our network capacity to support the explosion we are experiencing in wireless internet use,” added Mr Wright.

Speeds represented are network peak downlink speeds. Actual customer download speeds will be less and will vary due to congestion, distance from the cell, local conditions, hardware, software and other factors.