Spark's '4.5G' would probably be the best thing currently I'd think. That is essentially 4G using Carrier Aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and a higher modulation rate.

However unless you're paying $$$$$ for a lot of data, what is the point other than boasting about a speedtest result? 

Vodafone and Spark are using multiple carriers on 4G and have for a number of years

John

yahnz:

 

Any thoughts from more knowledgeable folks here about 4G/LTE speeds in NZ?

 

So you can hit your carrier's throttle threshold faster :)

Please justify a genuine use case for this technology in the next 5 years someone? We hardly even use 4G to its potential (only really just getting into a 4G requirement from 3G HSPA+) 

oh blah blah "use case" this "not required" that. Who cares, we are geeks!.... It's all about the speedtest!

....as i post this on our 100Mbps fibre that won't be upgraded to 1Gbps because, what's the point haha

I was talking about this the other day at work with someone and they did a speedtest and it reached well over 200Mbp/s DL and 48 M/bps UL over 4G here in Takapuna

John

Absolutely, all of the Spark 4.5 and 4.9G towers can do this quite easily (tower load depending ofcourse). 

In many of the areas Spark has these, the towers regularly peak over 1gbit. be it from end users running a quick test or purely areas with alot of wireless broadband connections.

Regardless of provider there are always a few gotchas.

Deploying the hardware to do these speeds in some places are simply infeasible.

Take a tower out in the wops surrounded by trees, It's hardly going to be reasonable to run band 7 or band 40 there as the trees will just gobble that up. While Band 28, Band 5 and 8 will often go far (be it with their very limited bandwidth in compassion). Quite often Band 3 also goes well in these situations to offload the closer traffic.