MTN South Africa and Huawei have successfully trialled what they say is Africa’s first LTE Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) network. The test was done in Pretoria. The LTE LAA trial was completed by aggregating 15MHz of MTN’s licensed 2100MHz spectrum with 40MHz of spectrum lin the unlicensed 5GHz band. This achieved a peak downlink throughput of over 400Mbps as measured by the Ookla Speedtest application.
Giovanni Chiarelli, Chief Technology and Information Officer for MTN SA, says LTE LAA will be a game changer for the industry and will provide customers with an enhanced network experience. The system uses the 'Listen Before Talk' functionality to enable it to coexist in the same area as Wi-Fi networks without degrading their performance.
All tests were conducted on a non-commercial prototype device. MTN expects commercial devices which support LTE LAA to be available in the market later this year.
