Ericsson and Telstra (Australia) announced the world’s first demonstration of 1 Gbps capability with five carrier LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation integrated on a live end-to-end mobile network.
LTE-Advanced is major enhancement of the current Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard with a goal to offer Internet download speeds up to 1Gbps.
Downlink speeds in excess of 950Mbps were achieved with a UDP (User Datagram Protocol) speed test application by aggregating 100 MHz of spectrum across Telstra’s spectrum holdings.
Ericsson said it has been able to hit download speeds of over 843Mbps over the Internet to the speedtest.net site. Reaching speeds of 1Gbps was an original goal of the LTE standard, making this demonstration a key milestone in the evolution of LTE-Advanced, the network vendor and solutions claimed.
In the test, downlink speeds were achieved by aggregating 100 MHz of spectrum across the 700 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz (2 x 20 MHz) bands and delivered to a Cobham Aeroflex TM500 mobile device.
Ericsson says that the aggregation of 100 MHz of spectrum using five carriers across four separate bands, as achieved in this test, lays the groundwork for the aggregation of higher frequency bands on the road to 5G.
Currently Telstra customers in Australia can access speeds with devices capable of up to 450 Mbps on compatible handsets and 600 Mbps on a mobile hotspot in selected 4GX coverage areas.
LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation enables operators to combine spectrum across different bands, enabling the more efficient use of spectrum to deliver a better user experience to customers throughout the network.
Per Narvinger, Head of LTE, Ericsson says: “With the high pace of innovation in the device and application industry, users increasingly expect high-performance coverage and the ability to use their apps anytime, anywhere. Activating new advanced network capabilities provides operators with a more solid and secure network performance.”
This is the third world-first capability milestone that Telstra and Ericsson have achieved together this year, following 450 Mbps in February and 600 Mbps in September 2015.
