Telstra and Huawei are testing LTE mobile broadband using 1800MHz spectrum, and have achieved some pretty impressive speeds.

In a lab environment using 20MHz of spectrum, peak downlink speeds of 149.4Mbps have been achieved, with 59Mbps peak uplink. Field trials carried out over the last six months in the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill and using 10MHz of spectrum gave peak results of 69.3Mbps and 24Mbps respectively.

Officials said this was more than three times the peak speeds achieved with current mobile technology. All of the equipment used in the trial was supplied by Huawei.

"These trials not only showed the impressive speeds made possible by LTE, but also the demonstrated the viability of using 1800MHz spectrum to deliver LTE in coming years," said Huawei CTO Peter Rossi.

"As mobile customers move away from 2G services and onto 3G and LTE, 1800MHz spectrum will increasingly become available to be re-farmed by operators. The overwhelming success of these trials shows that 1800MHz can be an attractive option for deploying LTE where access to other spectrum bands is constrained," he said.

What did Telstra have to say about the trial? Please read on.

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TMike Wright, Telstra executive director networks and access technologies, said "The significance of the trial with Huawei equipment is that it allowed Telstra to test the performance of LTE at 1800MHz and we were able to test the limits of the technology and explore its performance against a number of criteria."

"As a technology, LTE has some unique characteristics that result in improved radio network capability and efficiency such as improved capacity and speed," he added.

Earlier this year, Huawei set a record LTE-Advanced download speed of 1.2Gbps at the CTIA Wireless 2010 event held in Las Vegas.