Ericsson demoes LTE-A super broadband in Africa

Ericsson has worked with operator Unitel to demonstration of the end-to-end LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) Carrier Aggregation (CA) in a wireless network capable of supporting data speeds up to 450Mbit/s.

According to Ericsson, this is one of the first demonstrations of 450Mbit/s data rate on a commercial LTE network.

The demonstration link operated in 60MHz of spectrum, with three 20MHz LTE carriers in band 3 (1800 MHz), band 7 (2600 MHz) and band 1 (2100 MHz) respectively.

LTE-A carrier aggregation is a network architecture which is designed to make more efficient use of radio spectrum and so meet increasing data capacity.

What does LTE-A add to LTE.

The short answer is: carrier aggregation, higher-order MIMO, and hetrogeneous networks.

Carrier aggregation

The maximum LTE-A down-stream data rate between a single basestation and a single handset is 300Mbit/s.

Achieving this needs 100MHz of bandwidth, which no network operator has in one chunk of spectrum.

Instead, to get 100MHz, five 20MHz bands, called ‘component carriers’ have to share the data load.

Carrier aggregation is the capability required at both basestation and handset to split and re-combine one stream of data packets across multiple component carriers, or many streams of packets (total 300Mbit/s max.) to multiple handsets across multiple carriers. Carriers will be re-allocated once every 1ms.

“In countries across Africa, mobile broadband technology enables access to tools, services, expertise, entertainment, and information that was previously out of reach to the majority,” said Fredrik Jejdling, head of Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa.

Mobile World Congress 2015 takes place in Barcelona 2-5 March

Tom Wilson

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via Yuichun