Australia’s mobile operators have expressed concern about spectrum allocations in the country, which are not adequate to support LTE services, The Australian reports. The issue centres around the 1800MHz frequency allocations, where “no carrier has licences allowing  them to create blocks larger than 15MHz in any one region and most are limited to 10MHz in metropolitan markets,” compared with the 20MHz of contiguous spectrum that is needed to deliver the best possible LTE performance. In addition, the 1800MHz spectrum is also currently in use for 2G services, meaning that only a limited amount is available for LTE: 700MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum has not yet been allocated in Australia. Last week, Telstra announced plans to launch LTE services using its 1800MHz allocation, alongside its existing HSPA+ network which uses 850MHz spectrum, and Vodafone has also trialled LTE in the 1800MHz band.

Separately, it was reported that Vodafone Hutchison Australia is set to replace much of its existing 2G infrastructure with 3G kit from Huawei, following a long period of criticism of the quality of its network. It was suggested that this network refresh will also enable Vodafone to deploy LTE-ready equipment, in order to prepare for the launch of services in competition with Telstra. According to The Australian, Vodafone is also planning to speed the build-out of an 850MHz network, which is intended to provide additional capacity in areas of peak demand. On the company’s website, Nigel Dews, CEO of VHA, apologised for the poor performance, stating that the problems have been caused by customer demand growing faster than anticipated. Earlier this year, a “class action” lawsuit was initiated which alleged a poor performance from the Vodafone network.