MTN South Africa said it has successfully completed Africa's first commercial LAA deployment, working with Huawei and Qualcomm.Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA) uses unlicensed spectrum to deploy LTE networks. The commercial deployment was implemented in Pretoria, the political center and administrative capital of South Africa.
Tests were conducted by aggregating three component carriers, including 15 MHz licensed spectrum on the 2100 MHz frequency band and 40 MHz unlicensed spectrum on the 5 GHz band. Based on Huawei's LampSite solution and terminals that use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with X16 LTE modem, the tests demonstrated a downlink peak throughput of 400 Mbps.
LAA is now fully supported on Huawei Small Cell series products. Beginning in May, MTN SA will start deploying LAA-compliant LampSite modules in South Africa.
