Telekom Austria today announced that it has successfully run a Long-Term Evolution (LTE) trial, performing a live LTE video call between technical engineers driving in a bus in Vienna´s 21st District, one of the company’s LTE test areas, and their counterparts in the provincial capitals of Graz, Klagenfurt, Linz, Salzburg and Innsbruck. The LTE live test-call was performed with Telekom Austria Group’s telepresence videoconfering system, which supports life-size images with an ultra-high-definition video signal.
Telekom Austria’s LTE live demonstration, which was based on the successful combination of next-generation mobile technologies and fixed net infrastructure, underpins the potential of LTE to deliver a future-proof mobile broadband experience by enabling extremely high bandwidths under real-world network conditions. The LTE transmitters currently cover a few test areas in Vienna´s 2nd and 21st districts and in St. Pölten in Lower Austria. The LTE transmitters as well as nearly 1,000 further base stations are connected via high-performance fiber.
The LTE trial and the roll-out of mobile technologies such as HSPA+ and their successful combination with the fixed net infrastructure enables Telekom Austria Group to effectively work with an increased surge in traffic volumes and multimedia data-hungry applications. Telekom Austria says its mobile network, for instance, registered a 250-fold increase in its monthly data volume over the past 5 years. Mobile broadband customers reached more than 500,000 subscribers, which represents a 7-fold increase since 2006.
Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO Telekom Austria Group, said: “We expect data volumes to continue to surge going forward. Such sharp rises in data traffic will only be able to be managed by combining the latest mobile and fixed net technologies based on so-called air-to-fiber solutions. LTE will meet the significant future capacity requirements of mobile usage. “AirToFiber” enables the transfer of large data volumes most efficiently.”