Australia : A fleet of 64 specially equipped test vehicles is travelling more than 10,000 kilometres a day testing Telstra's Next G™ network - helping Telstra get even better coverage on Australia's largest and fastest 3G network.

Inset shows one of the Next G handsets - the NEXT G Telstra 850 from ZTE.

The fleet is staffed by an army of 120 engineers from Ericsson and Telstra who are making voice and data calls every 90 seconds to test voice and data quality and performance.

Executive Managing Director, Telstra Wireless, Mr John Gonner, said the vehicles have already covered more than one million square kilometres in their travels.

"Telstra and Ericsson technicians are travelling to hundreds of mobile sites around the nation," Mr Gonner said. "The technicians are doing an audit of which base stations need fine-tuning as we work to ensure the Next G™ network will be able to provide coverage equal to or better than the existing CDMA network by the end of 2007.

"Drive testing is part of our continuous improvement program as we grow and enhance the Next G™ network which already covers 98 per cent of the population," Mr Gonner said.

After the test vehicles complete their daily routes, the network teams send the test results to the network test centres for compilation and analysis. Engineers then assess performance and report on recommended changes. These can be either physical changes - such as redirection of an antenna, or data configuration changes to improve the quality of voice calls.

Following the implementation of recommended changes, follow up drive testing determines if further fine-tuning of the network is required.

Earlier this week Telstra launched world-first field trials to increase peak network speeds on its new turbo-charged Next G™ network by about 300 per cent - to 14.4 Mbps - by early next year.

The trials, taking place in rural Victoria, will help prepare the Next G™ network for expected boosts in customer demand for data rich applications and new content services like FOXTEL on mobiles.

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