Norway's TeliaSonera subsidiary NetCom is claiming to have reached a "world record" in download speeds of up to 1 Gbps in Oslo, Norway, using gear from Huawei that's dubbed as 4.5G and officially known as LTE Advanced Pro.
The demo occurred outdoors under real-life conditions using currently available frequency bands. "NetCom is the first operator in the world to take the LTE Advanced Pro technology out of the test laboratory and build a pilot outdoors under real life conditions," the operator said in a press release. "To achieve the high speed, NetCom transmitted data over four frequency bands simultaneously, and what makes today's test special is that NetCom only used frequency resources that are already available for mobile today: 800 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz.
In November, Huawei and HKT declared that they had successfully demonstrated the world's first 4.5G, 1 Gbps mobile network at the Global Mobile Broadband Forum 2015, held indoors at the Asia-World Expo center in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong MBB Experience Tour on HKT's 1 Gbps LTE commercial network was a highlight of the Global MBB Forum 2015.
In Norway, NetCom set its speed record on Dec. 14, the same day NetCom six years ago declared itself the first operator in the world to introduce 4G. "Today we have shown the future of mobile networks and a taste of what we can expect on our way to 5G," said Abraham Foss, CEO of TeliaSonera Norway, in the release. "NetCom has always been a pioneer. We will always challenge, be innovative and stay ahead of development, and we will be an important driver for digitizing Norway and the society around us. As a company, we want to learn new things in order to give customers access to new technology. We want to create a digital democracy where our customers are able to have the world in their hands, at all times."
TeliaSonera Norway CTO Jon Christian Hillestad said it marks an important step toward 5G. "We do not know exactly which speeds the future will require, but we know that the digitization era, where the Internet of Things will continuously grow, will demand much higher speeds," he stated. "The future will require bandwidth, high speed and no delay in transfers. We are preparing for that reality with the LTE Advanced Pro."
Huawei expects the commercial deployment of 4.5G among operators will start in 2016. In the demo with HKT, Huawei and HKT introduced a four-component carrier (CC) carrier aggregation (CA network), with a peak download speed said to be 2.6 times faster than the three-CC CA network record.
In the U.S., Nokia Networks (NYSE:NOK) North America CTO Mike Murphy recently told FierceWirelessTech that LTE will continue to evolve and while there's a lot of carrier aggregation being implemented by carriers today, it will improve and combine four carriers rather than three next year. "LTE keeps on getting better and better," he said.
For more:
- see this Huawei release
- see this TeliaSonera release
- see this Mobile World Live article
- see this RCR Wireless article
Related articles:
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