Telstra today unveiled the official name for its new 4G service, running on the 700 Mhz spectrum and due to start rolling out in the coming months. Named 4GX, you could read the ‘X’ as ‘eXtra’, giving more speed and more coverage, and will also cover aggregation services between the carrier’s new 700 and existing 1800 Mhz services.
The switch has also been flipped today on 4GX services in some areas of Hobart today and Brisbane gets to join the party on Wednesday. It’s not just capital cities getting in on the 4GX action either, with Telstra announcing that services would be switched on in Albany, Ulladulla, Murray Bridge, Narrawallee, Shepparton, Bateman’s Bay, Swansea, Bunbury, Port Macquarie and Chinchilla this week. The 4GX branding will be used to indicate to customers where the new services are available.
Telstra’s keen to push the possibilities offered by Category 4 and Category 6 devices running on the 4GX network, with Galaxy Note 4 devices in the room scoring big marks on speed tests – though officially, Telstra’s saying that Category 6 devices will get between 2Mbps and 100Mbps. We’ve seen some stellar results from the device from our readers (and rest assured, Telstra also noticed those tweets).
Discussing future possibilities that are allowed by the 4GX service, we were also treated to Telstra’s first public demonstration of a Voice over LTE call with both voice and video calling, switching between circuit-switched and IP-based networks without dropping the call. Mention was also made of LTE Broadcast experiments going on at major sporting events around the country, including upcoming tests at some of Melbourne’s Spring Racing Carnival events.
Finally, what good would a super fast network be without a device with which to test it? Unfortunately Telstra didn’t give us all a Galaxy Note 4 (nor a Nexus 6), but they did give us their latest LTE hotspot device, the soon-to-be-released Wi-Fi 4G Advanced II, manufactured by Netgear (according to the sticker on the box, it’s actually Netgear’s recently-released Aircard 790S.
We’ll be taking Telstra’s 4GX network out for a spin over the next couple of weeks using the 4G Advanced II hotspot and seeing how it performs.
Are you keen to get on board Telstra’s new 4GX network? Tell us in the comments!
