Breaking 3G speed record again

· World-first 42Mbps HSPA achievement on commercial products
· Increases speed for every user, enables true "instant access"
· Made possible only by software upgrade

Mobile broadband with HSPA continues to evolve. In a world with a continuous demand for faster speed, industry leaders are keen to upgrade networks in order to give consumers an even better experience. Australian operator, Telstra was amongst leading operators who were in attendance when Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) demonstrated its latest mobile broadband technology, HSPA Evolution with 42Mbps, near Stockholm, Sweden.

It was the first time in the world such speeds was achieved on commercially-available products. Until now, consumers have seen network speeds of 28Mbps at best.

Michael Rocca, acting Chief Operations Officer of Telstra says: "The Telstra Next G™ network has already changed the way Australians live and work with its speed, capacity and coverage. What we are discovering with the HSPA Dual Carrier tests is a super fast mobile broadband solution that, once compatible devices are available, will deliver meaningful speed, capacity and efficiency improvements on the network."

Ulf Ewaldsson, Vice President and Head of Product Area Radio at Ericsson says: "Our studies show that consumers are thirsty for higher speed and choose operators that can offer the best performance for an attractive price. Our HSPA technology for 42Mbps is now available for deployment."

Faster speeds give consumers a real feeling of "instant access". The new dual carrier technology can be implemented with a software upgrade only and doubles the speed for users everywhere in the cell of the mobile network, even for users at the edge of the cell, where performance is generally lower. This will also increase the capacity and operators can deliver more gigabytes per base station, hence reducing the cost of delivering mobile broadband to consumers.

Commercially-available hardware and software was used with the first commercial chipset for 42Mbps dual carrier technology. The average consumer download speed achieved in the demo was a staggering 41.5Mbps.

42Mbps is the peak network downlink speed. Actual customer download speeds are less and can vary due to congestion, distance from the base station, local conditions, hardware, software and other factors.