Canadian carrier Telus has revealed that its recently-launched ‘Quad-Band LTE’ – four-carrier aggregation (4C) LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) – high speed mobile data services have been expanded to cover 38 markets across eight provinces, mirroring a previous announcement from rival Bell Canada, with which Telus has nationwide joint network investment/sharing agreements. As reported by MobileSyrup, Telus’ Quad Band LTE service – commercialised on 1 June 2017 – currently delivers theoretical speeds of up to 750Mbps, with average speeds of ‘22Mbps to 174Mbps’, whilst device support is currently limited to the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ handsets.
Also this week, Telus and Nokia’s Nuage Networks division launched ‘TELUS Network as a Service (NaaS)’, a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) managed solution to enable businesses to ‘virtually build, manage and cloud-optimise their networks quickly, easily and cost-effectively’ via a self-serve platform. Navin Arora, Telus’ senior VP of business solutions, said: ‘Businesses looking to grow can be challenged by lengthy lead times and the complex IT required to build or change a network. TELUS Network as a Service is a game-changer for Canadian businesses, helping them optimise their IT and reduce costs.’ Telus claims its NaaS solution can reduce network deployment time by up to 80%, whilst providing full network performance data. Cloud-optimisation ensures that mission-critical traffic such as VoIP is prioritised over other types of traffic, whilst Telus claims a 99.9% uptime guarantee, with automatic wireless LTE backup in the event of the primary connection failing. The solution can be installed over any Telus internet connection, or those of ‘most other providers’, making it available to businesses across Canada.