MTS has deployed an FDD-TDD three band carrier aggregation network in Russia, a first for the country and one that offers peak speeds of 187MBps.
The Russia-based operator worked with Nokia on the project, which it said would pave the way towards 5G and improve indoor coverage.
The first commercial deployment of the technology was in Moscow’s business district, where smartphone users formerly had peak speeds of 75MBps in the FDD band and 112MBps over TDD.
Nokia and MTS aggregated 25MHz of spectrum, with 10MHz coming from 1800MHz, 10MHz from 2.6GHz and 5MHz from the 800 band.
Andrey Ushatsky, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at MTS, said: “We are continuously working to increase the quality and availability of our LTE services and cooperating with Nokia enables us to provide innovative and reliable services to our subscribers.
“Unique for Russia, FDD-TDD carrier aggregation functionality will let us increase average access speeds for flagship smartphones by 1.5-2 fold. This technology is important as its further implementation in Russia will help increase the efficiency of frequency resource use.”
JP Takala, head of East Europe market unit at Nokia, added: “LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation allows operators to leverage new network efficiencies and deliver a better customer experience through increased data speeds. This project with MTS marks a new milestone in our longstanding relationship with them, as we continue to trial technologies that allow the operator to take the next steps towards 5G.”
Last month MTS’s rival MegaFon held a pre-5G trial of carrier aggregation and MIMO, hitting speeds of 1GBps. It aggregated two 20MHz bands in its 2.6GHz holding with one 20MHz band at 1800MHz. It also used 256QAM modulation and 4×4 MIMO.