Let’s face it. Australian internet speeds are a fucking joke. Actually, joke implies something is funny about the situation. Frankly, it’s plain embarrassing. But that’s what happens when you take a good idea like an NBN, and absolutely trash it by insisting on copper wiring. All to save a few, I’ll say it again, a few bucks. Which is why what Telstra has just achieved is pretty impressive… all things considering.
The telecommunications company has clocked speeds of a gigabyte a second on the Samsung Galaxy S9 (and the S9+). Head of Mobiles, Kevin Teoh, has confirmed that it was the first time any commercial smartphone carried by a commercial network in Australia has successfully demonstrated speeds in excess of a cool gig. 1.03 gigabytes per second to be exact, occurring within the 4GX enabled Sydney regions of Telstra’s mobile network.
“Cracking the magic gigabit mark on smartphones is an exciting milestone,” says Teoh.
But as established previously, these are just baby steps on the global forum. Last month, Telstra delivered a far more impressive record-breaking demonstration of 4G download speeds at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The recorded speed for this event clocked in at two gigabytes a second.
“As smartphones evolve and we move into the 5G era there will be a new raft of sophisticated features that are enabled by reliably fast data speeds.”
Gigabit LTE deployment is currently underway in the Perth CBD, and expected to become more widely available soon thereafter. In the meantime, let’s just pray that no one uses the landline while we play Runescape for fear of disconnecting. I joke, but honestly, are we really that far off in comparison to the rest of the world?
