Telstra today super-charged the speeds on its Next G network from 3.6Mbps to 14.4Mbps and boosted the cell range up to 200km for more than 40 rural and coastal sites.

Telstra claims the move makes the Next G network the fastest and geographically biggest national wireless network in the world.

The announcement coincided with the release of new figures showing that the Next G network has already signed up more than 4000,000 customers in its first four months.

Telstra CEO, Sol Trujillo, said Next G had already created a paradigm shift in the way Telstra's customers work, live and play.

"The network has been super-charged as Telstra triples capacity and delivers peak network download speeds up to four times faster than originally available - the first national rollout of its kind globally," Trujillo said.

He said the switch on of the world's first 200 kilometre cell range in a commercial mobile broadband network increased Next G coverage to reach 98.8 per cent of Australians creating a network more than 100 times larger than Telstra's competitor 3G networks.

Telstra's Next G network test bed has leading manufacturers including Ericsson, Qualcomm, ZTE and Samsung undertaking advanced testing and support for new and evolving wireless technologies.

These manufacturers are already testing 7.2Mbps data cards and handsets for launch in mid-2007.

Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said said it is an attractive environment for Qualcomm to field test mobile chipsets when they advance from the lab.