Twenty LTE cell sites up and running in Hong Kong, says operator
CSL, the largest GSM operator in Hong Kong in terms of subscribers and revenue, announced at MWC 2010 that it has 20 active and fully operational LTE cell sites rolled out in Hong Kong using SDR (software-defined radio) base stations supplied by ZTE.
CSL’s CTO, Christian Daigneault, said the trials were showing peak download speeds upwards of 100Mbps on the streets of Hong Kong using USB modems. “Maybe we have to revisit the time in which LTE will be commercially available and rolled out in networks across the world,” he said in statement.
CSL, along with Telstra, its parent company, have been assessing for more than a year the performance of SDR base stations, which can accommodate different access bearers through software upgrades rather than changes in hardware. Since March 2009, CSL has been offering HSDPA+, with peak downlink speeds of 21Mbps, using ZTE’s SDR base stations.
Tarek Robbiati, group managing director of Telstra International and CSL CEO, says that data traffic has increased by 20 times using HSPAS+ over that of the legacy 3G network .
In September 2009, CSL also announced the rollout of UMTS HSPA+ in the 900MHz band, the first case of spectrum re-farming seen in Hong Kong.