Australia's Optus has successfully begun testing LTE-Advanced by activating the TD-LTE Advanced carrier aggregation. Optus announced it achieved single user peak speeds of over 160 Mbps on its commercial 4G Plus network in early December.

At its test facility in St Marys, west of Sydney, Optus achieved a throughput of 520 Mbps, by combining four 20 MHz channels of the 2300 MHz spectrum band into 80 MHz.

Today’s announcement follows earlier tests of the potential of the 4G Plus network, that demonstrated a site throughput of over 500 Mbps, when utilising the bulk of Optus’ 2300 TD-LTE spectrum.

Optus activated LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation on its 4G Plus network in Melbourne by joining two 20 MHz channels together on its 2300 MHz 4G Plus spectrum. Optus 4G Plus is currently live in select areas of Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and  Adelaide. Optus customers with compatible mobile devices can connect to either the 1800 MHz or 2300 MHz Optus 4G networks.