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Vodacom demos SA’s first 300Mbps mobile basestation

Want to know what the future of mobile broadband looks like? Mobile operator Vodacom demonstrated a performance of its first CAT6 4G network this afternoon, when it showed off a Huawei Ascend Mate downloading data from Speedtest.net at almost 270Mbps.

According to the engineers who switched the first transceiver on this morning at 4am, testing hit 312Mbps on the downlink and 41Mbps up in the early hours.

The bad news is that at the moment, only the Vodacom Dome conference theatre at the company’s Midrand HQ is covered by the technology, although a second site will be added soon.

Vodacom’s chief technology officer Andries Delport says that the firm applied for a temporary licence over the weekend to run the two base stations for a month, and it is looking at expanding the trial nationally as soon as it can get its hands on spectrum.

The speeds are made possible by bonding – or aggregating – multiple channels of an existing LTE signal for increased throughput. For the purposes of this trial, the firm is using two 20Mhz channels for the headline speeds. By 2019, it says it will be able to offer up to 1Gbps download speeds by adding more 4G channels.

Vodacom defines 4G as a network capable of channel bonding in this way. For the purposes this test, it was using spectrum from the 2 600Mhz frequency. Sentech promised to return the areas of that spectrum which it holds licences for late last year, and all eyes are on ICASA for how it intends to auction off future access.

According to Delport, the entire Vodacom network is now ready for 4G and LTE deployments, thanks to the completion of a massive upgrade project which has seen radio network (RAN) equipment in every base station upgraded with “single RAN” radio. It will make future upgrades to LTE and beyond much quicker.

The RAN upgrade project began in Mpumalanga in 2008 and concluded in the Free State this month. The firm currently operates some 10 000 base stations, of which 1 800 are currently LTE capable.

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