Ericsson and Qualcomm have demonstrated peak throughput of 300MBps using LTE-U, as controversy continues about the technology.
In a demonstration at PT/Expo Comm China 2015, the two companies combined one 20Mhz chunk of licensed spectrum with one 20MHz piece on the unlicensed 5GHz band.
Ericsson’s second-generation indoor picocell base station RBS 6402 was used in the trial, along with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with X12 LTE.
The demo marks the latest use of Ericsson’s LTE-U small cells, which it introduced at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show at the beginning of this year. The product will be available commercially by the end of 2015.
Advocates of LTE-U have argued it efficiently extends a mobile operator’s capacity. The licensed spectrum acts as an anchor while the unlicensed band provides capacity when required. Ericsson said its LTE-U products enable “fair sharing”, which it said helps accommodate Wi-Fi users.
However, LTE-U has been given a frosty reception from the Wi-Fi industry, with companies sceptical the two techs can co-exist.
At a recent conference in London, Sami Susiaho, Head of Edge Technologies at BskyB, shared a common concern among Wi-Fi companies that operators could use LTE-U to elbow them out of the 5GHz space.
He said: “There is a significant risk as the worst case scenario would see LTE coming to licence free without a sufficient co-existence mechanism or one that it is made ‘optional’ in the deployments.”