China Telecom tests Huawei’s 5G Super Uplink + Downlink CA

China Telecom Shenzhen is testing 5G Super Uplink and dual carrier aggregation (CA) downlink technology from Huawei.

The pilot site uses 200 MHz 3.5 GHz TDD spectrum and 20 MHz 2.1 GHz FDD spectrum in the uplink. Single-user concurrent tests were completed in standalone (SA) networking mode. The results of the test showed that the average uplink rate reached 470 Mbps and the average downlink rate 2.43 Gbps, which are approximately 1.3 times and double that with a single 100 MHz bandwidth, respectively.

Huawei claims 5G Super Uplink has notable advantages over uplink CA. Super Uplink enables integrated uplink scheduling between two uplink carriers in one cell. This scheduling mechanism is more efficient than uplink CA implemented between two cells. In addition, uplink and downlink bands are decoupled, enabling downlink carriers to be flexibly added to adapt to data traffic requirements. For example, CA can be disabled or implemented within one band or between two bands. As uplink CA depends on downlink CA and its bands must be a subset of downlink CA bands, uplink CA cannot be used in the cases of asymmetric uplink-only bands, further highlighting the greater flexibility of Super Uplink.

https://www.huawei.com/us/news/2020/8/shenzhen-telecom-5g-superuplink-dc