Verizon announced that in what is believed to be a U.S. wireless industry first, it has partnered with Ericsson, and Qualcomm Technologies, a subsidiary of Qualcomm, to demonstrate a mobile data rate of 953 Mbit/s in a joint commercial network deployment in Boca Raton, Florida.
Verizon noted that while lab tests have achieved comparable speeds in recent demonstrations, this is the fastest speed announced to date that has been achieved in a real-world, dynamic network environment leveraging Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology.
The demonstration utilised commercially available Verizon network components including a cell site, hardware, software and backhaul, with Ericsson providing the advanced remote radio head. The Ericsson micro Radio 2205 for LAA, designed for unlicensed spectrum use, is compact, provides for flexible mounting and is a component of the Ericsson Radio System, an end-to-end modular radio network portfolio of hardware and software designed for any site type and traffic scenario as networks transition towards 5G.
In addition, for the trial Qualcomm Technologies provided a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 mobile platform test device equipped with Gigabit LTE capability leveraging the integrated Snapdragon X16 LTE modem.
Verizon stated that the latest demonstration used a combination of the latest 4G LTE wireless technologies to deliver the higher mobile speeds. Technology employed included carrier aggregation, which enables multiple spectrum channels to be combined to allow data to be carried more efficiently and faster peak speeds.
Verizon noted that it was the first U.S. carrier to launch LTE Advanced with two channel carrier aggregation nationally last year, and has subsequently completed the deployment of three channel carrier aggregation using its licensed spectrum.
To achieve latest near-gigabit mobile speeds, Verizon used a combination of licensed and unlicensed spectrum for the first time. The four carrier aggregation utilises LAA to combine its spectrum holdings with unlicensed spectrum via home and commercial WiFi connectivity.
The demonstration with Ericsson and Qualcomm Technoogies also involved technology including 4 x 4 MIMO, which uses multiple antennae at the cell tower and on consumers’ devices to optimise data rates, 256QAM, allowing customer devices and the network to exchange information in larger amounts and thereby to deliver more bits of data in each transmission.
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- Recently, AT&T announced that it had achieved mobile speeds of 650 Mbit/s using LTE and LAA technology in a field trial working with Ericsson, while T-Mobile announced it had demonstrated 741 Mbit/s mobile data rate in a field trial of LAA technology.
