Telecom network vendor Ericsson today said Verizon, SK Telecom and T-Mobile US are testing the performance of License Assisted Access (LAA or LTE-U) on their networks.
LAA, a mobile technology innovation, is designed to improve indoor app coverage for smartphone users, said Ericsson.
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Ericsson will be demonstrating the latest technology at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2015) in Barcelona next month. The company announced LAA at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in the U.S. last month.
LAA, which is live in Ericsson labs, is supporting the aggregation of licensed and unlicensed spectrum for peak rates up to 450 Mbps and enabling fair sharing of spectrum between mobile and Wi-Fi devices.
“We are encouraged by the headway that Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies have made in demonstrating the benefits LAA can provide,” said Ed Chan, senior vice president, Network Planning, Verizon.
Ericsson will be adding LAA to its indoor small cell portfolio, including the Ericsson RBS 6402 Indoor Picocell (targeted at smaller buildings under 50,000 square feet) followed by the Ericsson Radio Dot System (for medium and large buildings) in the fourth quarter 2015.
Park Jin-hyo, senior vice president and head of Network Technology R&D Center, SK Telecom, said that it achieved the trial of the 450Mbps LAA.
LAA, or LTE-U, extends the benefits of LTE to unlicensed spectrum, providing reliable and predictable performance.
“With more than 500 MHz of underutilized spectrum in the 5 GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) band, LAA can provide our customers with superior network performance while effectively co-existing with other Wi-Fi devices to ensure a better experience for wireless users,” said Neville Ray, chief technical officer, T-Mobile.
Ericsson in association with Qualcomm conducted the lab trials of both LAA fair sharing and licensed-unlicensed aggregation – 20 MHz on licensed band and 40 MHz on unlicensed 5 GHz band – from the Ericsson radio development units in Ottawa, Canada and Stockholm, Sweden.
