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Telstra and Ericsson double LTE range

Australian operator Telstra and vendor Ericsson have announced that they have successfully managed to increase the range of an LTE cell from 100 km to 200 km. The announcement is available on Telstra exchange here and on Ericsson's website here.

No technical details are available and the range assumption would be that while the existing cells can cover up to 100 km radius, the enhancement would increase the radius up to 200 km.

Picture source: Exploroz

Telstra blog states:

Until now, global wireless 4G standards have managed to achieve a range of only 100km from the cell. While that’s still impressive, we’re always looking to push our network capabilities further for our customers. Working with our partner Ericsson, we have deployed a solution that enables standard 4G phones to work at a distance up to 200km from the mobile base station.

We recently completed an extended call using one of our sites at Mount Dowe, east of Narrabri in New South Wales, Australia. Further testing and refinement is underway and we expect that it will become commercially available later in 2020 across select locations, further boosting network coverage as demands continue to grow.

This is a big win for our regional and remote customers. We live in a vast nation and providing 4G coverage in more places is critical in ensuring that we are providing the best coverage to our customers both in the city and the country.

This isn’t necessarily a solution for everywhere – the location of the mobile base station and the surrounding topography need to be right for the mobile device signal to get back to the base station  – but this will certainly be another deployment option in our 4G coverage toolkit when we are expanding and improving our network.

We continually work with our partners like Ericsson to provide innovative solutions to our customer needs. This achievement builds on previous mobile world firsts, including when Ericsson and Telstra again achieved another world’s first when we extended the 3G cell range to 200km in February 2007.

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