Telstra fires back at Optus’s 4G rollout

Just hours after Optus announced its plans to rollout 4G services to 70% of residential customers by the middle of next year, Telstra fired off its own press statement boasting about its 4G rollout.

Yesterday, SmartCompany reported Optus’s announcement of a TD-LTE (time division long-term evolution) rollout across 12 sites in the ACT on bandwidth purchased from Vivid Wireless, along with its metropolitan 4G rollout plans.

In response, Telstra issued a statement of its own, boasting about how it had switched on its 1500th 4G base station, in a bid to reach 66% of the Australian population by the end of next month.

“The program is now running at pace and is on target – our technicians are now installing literally dozens of 4G base stations each and every week,” says Telstra’s networks executive director Mike Wright.

“It’s great to mark the 1500th milestone, but we’ve committed to installing over 2000 base stations by the end of this financial year and we’ll keep working to meet this target.”

The telco giant also reiterated the addition of 600,000 new devices to its 4G mobile network since announcing its half-yearly profit in February, with the total growing from 1.5 million to 2.1 million devices in less than a quarter.

The total includes 1.4 million handsets and 150,000 tablets, with the company counting each device as a “customer”.

“We now have over 2.1 million services connected to our 4G network and as the network grows we obviously expect that number to grow with it,” Wright says.

“This network expansion involves a significant amount of complexity across our engineering teams and industry partners, and is a great reflection on our capability which has delivered a new milestone every 12 months for the past three years,” Wright says.