e-News® | The NEWS Company…Guangzhou, June 18 2015 : China Mobile has teamed up with Chinese equipment vendor ZTE to trial tri-band carrier aggregation (CA) LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) to achieve theoretical peak download speeds of more than 300Mb/s using CAT 9 devices powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor.
The downlink data rates of the commercial trial in Guangzhou were more than triple the speeds of existing TD-LTE networks. As the provider of China Mobile’s radio access and core networks, ZTE said it supported the upgrade of the operator’s network without a major overhaul of its existing infrastructure and software. ZTE said that since the deployment of carrier aggregation involves the upgrading of every aspect of a network, from chipsets for terminals to the core system, commercialisation is a prolonged process of evolution.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona ZTE partnered with China Mobile and Qualcomm to demonstrate tri-band CA TD-LTE service with commercial terminals for the first time. Hong Kong’s HKT and Huawei in April demonstrated LTE-A service using tri-band CA to achieve a theoretical peak download speed of 450Mb/s. HKT is rolling out its LTE-A 450Mb/s network and expects the network to be commercialised next year.
Last October Nokia Networks and Qualcomm said they have completed interoperability testing of LTE-A three-band CA, which enables peak data rates of 300Mb/s using 40MHz over three frequencies. Using Nokia’s Flexi Multi-radio 10 base station, the tests were conducted at a Nokia lab in Germany on 3GPP bands 1, 3 and 5 and verified that three-band CA works with user devices based on the Snapdragon 810 processor.
