Telecom equipment vendor Huawei has assisted Australian mobile operator Optus to deploy Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology on a live commercial TD-LTE network with speeds hitting more than 160 Mb/s.
Earlier, the trial of CA and other advanced technologies saw speeds hit over 500 Mb/s on TD-LTE.
The Chinese telecom equipment maker expects to launch mobile broadband devices compatible with CA (known as Cat-6 TD-LTE) in 2014.
Huawei Australia CTO Peter Rossi said that by combining two or more channels or carriers on existing live commercial LTE spectrum bands, Optus can dramatically increase throughput on its mobile data network.
The CA deployment combines two 20MHz carriers on Optus’ 2300 MHz 4G Plus spectrum. Initial tests have already shown speeds of above 160 Mb/s on a single device.
“Introducing LTE carrier aggregation into a live, commercial TD-LTE network is a world first and an exciting technology innovation for us,” said Vic McClelland, Managing Director of Optus Networks.
Additional CA tests have been conducted by Huawei and Optus in St Marys, west of Sydney, combining four 20MHz carriers for a total of 80MHz on the 2300MHz band to deliver mobile broadband speeds of over 520 Mb/s.
The same trial also demonstrated a number of additional LTE technologies including:
* 4×4 MIMO (multi-input-multi-output), which delivered 125 Mb/s speeds on a single 20MHz carrier, said Huawei in a statement.
*Beamforming, where the network intelligently forms radio signals to deliver the best experience to users as they move around a cell coverage area. Beamforming tests showed a 67 percnt improvement in data speeds at the edge of a cell, from 18 Mb/s to 30 Mb/s.
*Circuit-Switched (CS) Fallback, which allows Packet-Switched LTE 4G connections to revert to CS GSM/UMTS 3G networks for voice calls.
