Vodafone has announced that they have kicked off 4G trials in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. So far they’ve been testing the data speeds and MMS Services and their handover of voice calls to the nearest network, ensuring that the handover is seamless and users do not notice a drop in service.
They’ve been testing the 4G service in the 1800MHz spectrum, the same spectrum used by both Optus and Telstra on their 4G Networks. Vodafone has powered up 4G towers in the Alexandria, Bronte and Randwick area where they are running tests using 10MHz of bandwidth; however, Vodafone intend to be using 20MHz in Sydney and all the states in Australia when they do launch. The 20MHz of spectrum will effectively give them double the bandwidth of Telstra in most markets and an advantage over Optus who operate using 15MHz of bandwidth.
So far they’ve been getting some pretty impressive speeds according to their SpeedTest screenshot, however these results should be taken with a grain of salt due to the lack of other users on the network and Vodafone advise that once the network is live users should see average downloads between 2Mbps and 40Mbps :
It’s a pretty good start but Vodafone are already starting on the back foot with many users leaving over network concerns. However, with these initial test speeds showing pretty good throughput and a brand spanking new 4G network with 20MHz of bandwidth to play with, the Vodafone 4G network is off to a very promising start.
