Optus' first demonstration of its Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G mobile service took place in Gordon, Sydney recently, which proved to be quite a success.

Utilising two base stations at Gorden and Pymble combined with mobile network equipment provided by Nokia Siemens Networks, Optus' LTE technology achieved quite impressive download speeds of 40Mbps and upload speeds of 850Kbps, which equates to around about a 10x boost in performance over current speeds on their existing 3G network.

The second phase of Optus' trial is said to commence a little later this year which will see the use of many more base stations that will give the ability to put a lot more load on the network. Phase 2 will also be used to see how the network interacts with existing 2G and 3G networks.

Most of Optus' LTE vendors are anticipating a worldwide commercial launch of the tech near the end of the year.