The real-life performance of LTE is under the microscope with the Hong Kong-based operator CSL following tests of the technology in various city and residential locations.

The company, which has overlaid 20 LTE base stations onto its existing HSPA infrastructure, claims to have recorded download speeds as high as 127Mb/s in its new technology centre, and a consistent 70Mb/s during drive testing – albeit that this was with a single user.

“The performance of LTE operating at 2.6GHz is very promising,” said Christian Daigneault, CSL’s CTO, at a press conference Tuesday. “In fact, the speed is being limited by the LTE dongle we’re using, and we’ve also identified bottlenecks in our network – not related to the RAN – that are throttling back the performance.”

According to Daigneault, the trial was designed to better understand the potential speeds and coverage of LTE, and to benchmark it against HSPA+. Using base stations supplied by ZTE, the company said that it planned to increase the number of LTE sites over the next three to six months.
“But, HSPA+ has many years of life left, and will co-exist with LTE in areas where we need high capacity.”

Commenting on the success of its HSPA+ network, Tarek Robbiati, CEO of CSL, said that data volumes had increase 20x since the launch. “Data traffic has now surpassed voice by a factor or 3:1, and we recognise that our business model is rapidly changing. Maybe we’re becoming an ISP?”

“With the continued proliferation of smartphones and other devices, we expect the exponential growth in data traffic in Hong Kong to continue for many years,” said Robbiati. He added that CSL’s 900MHz HSPA+ network deployment had been shown to provide much better inbuilding coverage than the same technology operating in different spectrum bands.