Telekom Austria Group’s domestic subsidiary A1 has hit speeds of 500MBps in a tri-carrier aggregation demonstration with Nokia.
Frequencies in the 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2.6GHz bands were used in addition to 256QAM at the trial, which was held at the University of Kleganfurt. Speeds of 513MBps were hit over A1’s live network on a mobile router, while a smartphone reached 463MBps.
A1 described the trial as an important step on the road to 5G. The operator said implementation is expected in 2020.
A1 CTO Marcus Grausam said: “The use of different frequency bands that span a wide section of radio spectrum is also very important for 5G transmission speeds. A1 has an excellent frequency spectrum here and is already optimally prepared for the new generation of mobile communications.
“In Austria we will already be making selective use of triple carrier aggregation in 2017. As soon as there are sufficient end devices on the market, we will use the technology in those areas where especially large volumes of capacity are needed in the network – above all in urban areas.”
Peter Wukowits, Nokia Country Manager Austria and Head of the Customer Business Team Central Europe, said: “What we saw today was a preliminary stage of 5G. In further steps we will also see even greater bandwidths up into the gigabit range, higher capacities and denser networks and fewer transmission delays. The foundations have already been laid in the laboratory and the technology will now be coming to the live networks.”
Last week, Denmark’s TDC went live with its three carrier LTE-Advanced network, which it said offers speeds of up to 1GBps.
Other operators, such as Deutsche Telekom, have gone further and experimented with five-band carrier aggregation, which hit speeds of 1.2GBps.