Huawei and Vodafone Spain have announced that they have successfully completed with world’s first GSM-LTE dynamic spectrum sharing (GL DSS) trial.
The trial verified GL DSS performance in the Vodafone Spain commercial network making 15MHz effectively available for LTE with limited impact to GSM services, the China-based vendor said.
Several operators, including Vodafone, currently hold bandwidths of 20MHz at 1.8GHz, of which 10MHz is used for LTE and the rest for high GSM traffic.
According to Huawei, GL DSS dramatically improves LTE capacity – by up to 50 percent – by maximising wireless spectrum.
The trial is a major milestone for its Single Radio Controller (SRC) spectrum management tool, which brings flexibility to spectrum resource allocation, and provides more spectrum for LTE compared to the standard fixed configuration through dynamic allocation, it added.
Huawei chose Vodafone’s Mobile Access Competence Centre in Spain to trial the SRC.
In May, UK regulator Ofcom announced it is looking at spectrum sharing and repurposing bandwidth to cope with the expected boom in data usage across mobile devices and M2M.
[Read more: Ofcom outlines UK’s future spectrum strategy]
Better use of spectrum is also being discussed at a European level as part of a wider reform of the telecoms market.
Industry body the GSMA said in April that operators should be given spectrum from broadcasters.
[Read more: Broadcasters should help operators meet spectrum crunch, says GSMA]