Ericsson, Vodafone and Qualcomm have conducted the world's first live testing of advanced LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA) of LTE in licensed and unlicensed bands on a commercial mobile network. The trials are being conducted over Vodafone's network in the Netherlands. The testing validated LTE performance in the unlicensed band and fair co-existence with other technologies like Wi-Fi within the unlicensed 5 GHz band.
The trial used the Ericsson RBS 6402 indoor small cell, which supports LTE CA between licensed and unlicensed bands on Vodafone's commercial network, connected to a LTE unlicensed band capable test device developed by Qualcomm.
The latest over the air results were achieved by aggregating 20 MHz of Vodafone spectrum in Band 3 (1800 MHz) with 20 MHz of the unlicensed 5 GHz band U-NII-1 band. The Ericsson RBS 6402 Indoor Picocell includes a 5GHz LTE enabled radio, multiple LTE radio variants and an optional 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi module, all with a tablet-sized footprint. The user equipment in the trial is a test device powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X12 LTE modem.
Vodafone Netherlands said the test achieved speeds of 274 Mbps. The operator is also working on a second live demo with Huawei to frther develop the LAA technology. Licence Assisted Access (LAA) can use up to 600 MHz spectrum to boost capacity and speed over LTE networks. It's expected to be included in 3GPP Release 13 in 2016. Once the standard is completed, commercial equipment and services can be developed.
