Vodafone (VHA) may be running a little behind schedule with its 4G LTE network that it originally hoped, but never promised, to have up and running by February of this year. A short while back Australia’s largest 3G-only carrier went and added the Samsung Galaxy S3 4G to its lineup, meaning that an announcement was likely not too far off.
Today, Vodafone has finally officially announced that its 4G LTE network will be launching from June in Australia. No specific day in June, mind you. But ‘June’ at least represents a clear timeframe in which the lucky first customers can expect to start seeing 4G speeds.
Initially beginning with its major support focused in Sydney and Perth, Voda 4G will also have small coverage in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, The Gold Coast, Newcastle and Woollongong.
Vodafone is already offering a range of 4G LTE enabled devices, including the upcoming and highly anticipated HTC One, the popular Sony Xperia Z, the iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy Note II, mid-rangers HTC One SV and Nokia Lumia 820, the HTC Windows Phone 8X, the aforementioned Samsung Galaxy S3 4G and the soon to be released Samsung Galaxy S4. The iPad with Retina Display and iPad Mini are also available.
VHA has also reported some fairly impressive test speeds on its blog, with quoted download speeds of between 60Mbps and 67Mbps, backed up by a screen-cap showing 66.17Mbps.
Almost admirably, Vodafone actually added a disclaimer outlining the likely differences between its test speeds and eventual real-world speeds.
Test speeds vs. Actual speeds
The speeds we’ve been referring to are ‘test’ speeds, as the testing environment is unique in that we’re the only ones using the 4G network. Similar to driving a car, if you’re on a road with no traffic or speed restrictions, it’s fair to say you’d be travelling much faster. A mobile network is much the same. Once we add all the potential speed bumps outside of the testing environment, we will really be able to see the speeds that can be achieved, and this is how we calculate ‘actual’ speeds. The type of things which can affect speeds are:congestion; user numbers; local conditions; hardware; software; download source; and, general internet traffic. On Vodafone 4G, we’re expecting actual speeds between 2-40Mbps.
- via Vodafone’s blog
Should the network actually offer between 2 and 40Mbps it will be easily in line with what we’ve seen so far from the Telstra and Optus 4G LTE networks. The main problem Vodafone has now is expanding the network in order to ‘catch up’ with the two already well-established networks.
It’s no secret that Vodafone has been flailing recently. While it’s experienced nothing compared to the massive network outages and customer dissatisfaction of a couple years’ back, it’s still never fully regained its reputation. As such it’s difficult to tell if the opinions of any of its current dissatisfied customers are an accurate reflection of the carrier’s quality of service, or if VHA experiences similar problems to providers like Optus or Virgin Mobile that seem worse than they are based on already pre-conceived notions based on past performance.
Whatever the case, the new 4G LTE network should be a boost to Vodafone, at least in the short run. Admittedly, I personally was incredibly satisfied with Vodafone’s, at the time, ‘new’ 850MHz back when it launched in 2011. It was much faster than my old provider and I had great reception even in places where my friends didn’t.
However, as the years progressed and more and more devices joined the 850MHz bandwidth I’ve found my speed and connectivity have fallen back to more uninspiring, but still fairly satisfactory, levels.
The same could be easily true of 4G LTE. But there is, at least, a chance. Where VHA had to defer focus on the expansion of the 850MHz spectrum in favour of 4G, the chances of 4G LTE being superseded in the next 2-3 years are pretty slim. As such Vodafone can focus on continuing to expand in order to support a growing 4G LTE consumer base.
At the very least, Vodafone will finally be entering the 4G LTE market in Australia. For now it has a lot of catching up to do but, as they say, at least it’s in the race.
