Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo, in partnership with Docomo Beijing Communications Laboratories and Huawei, have announced today that their joint test has demonstrated that LTE can be deployed over the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum, currently used for wireless LAN networks. In research carried out at a Huawei facility in Beijing since February, Docomo and Huawei have been conducting experiments of Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA), a technology that expands LTE-compatible spectrum to unlicensed spectrum bands, thereby providing complementary access for the LTE operator network. Currently, LTE's compatible spectrum bands are licensed between the 700MHz and 2.5GHz bands in Japan.
The indoor test demonstrated that LAA can work in 5GHz bandwidth, leading to cell capacity of approximately 1.6 times greater than that of IEEE 802.11n, a standard specification for WLAN. This result shows that LAA can be utilized as an enhancement of LTE, and also LTE-Advanced, which Docomo plans to launch by March 2015.
