LTE Carrier Aggregation

Since my first post on fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, in August 2013, there has been a dramatic upsurge in activity and publicity on the topic. Leading organisations in the mobile industry have become increasingly vocal, in white papers, conferences and press releases, about the benefits of 5G, the technologies they expect to feature and the… Read more

One of the major features of LTE-Advanced is Carrier Aggregation, which allows mobile network operators to combine a number of separate LTE carriers. This enables them to increase the peak user data rates and overall capacity of their networks and to exploit fragmented spectrum allocations. I introduced the fundamentals of Carrier Aggregation in a previous… Read more

A few months ago I wrote a summary of facts and figures on HSPA+, LTE and LTE-Advanced, based on the 3GPP Release 11 standard. With Release 12 due to be finalised in the middle of 2014, I thought I would write about some of the developments in the pipeline in the 3GPP work programme. The expected… Read more

Since I wrote my previous post on the capabilities of HSPA+, LTE and LTE-Advanced, SK Telecom has announced the world’s first end-to-end commercial implementation of LTE-Advanced. Other network operators, including Verizon, AT&T and NTT DoCoMo, have announced plans, trials and network implementations of LTE-Advanced, but SK Telecom is the first to offer a commercial service with mobile… Read more

In the first few months of 2013 there have been signs that LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA) is coming to fruition, with a series of announcements of demonstrations, trials and launch plans by network operators and equipment manufacturers. Here are some examples: Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies and Sierra Wireless provided the first public demonstration of LTE Carrier Aggregation at Mobile… Read more

Earlier this month, Russian network operator Yota reported it had launched the world’s first commercial LTE-Advanced network, using equipment supplied by Huawei. The network comprises 13 base stations in Moscow and Yota has reported downlink data at up to 300Mbit/s. However, Yota has admitted that it will not have terminals available until 2013 and the… Read more

Working in the UK, where commercial LTE services  are still not available, it is easy to forget that standardisation of LTE has been underway for many years. The first 3GPP standards were frozen way back in 2008, in 3GPP Release 8, and no fewer than five 3GPP releases containing LTE aspects have now received attention… Read more

Last month, the GSA highlighted accelerating deployments of LTE networks, and predicted that there will be at least 103 LTE networks commercially launched by the end of 2012. While LTE itself is still a new wireless technology, the pace of further developments has not slackened. In my last post, I reported that Sprint Nextel and… Read more