Samsung unveils modem with six carrier aggregation

Samsung has announced the industry’s first LTE modem to support six carrier aggregation.

The new product can hit download speeds of 1.2GBps, enough to download a full-length HD film in 10 seconds.

This is an improvement of 20 percent compared to the previous generation, which supports five carrier aggregation.

The Cat.18 modem also features 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM, as well as supporting licensed assisted access, which allows licensed and unlicensed spectrum to be aggregated.

A mobile processor using the new LTE modem is expected to reach mass production by the end of 2017.

Woonhaing Hur, Vice President of System LSI Protocol Development at Samsung Electronics, said: “With the increase of high-quality online content services, the demand for high-performance LTE modems continue to rise as well.

“The 1.2Gbps maximum downlink speed with 6CA support highlights Samsung’s leading design capabilities and well positions Samsung for the upcoming 5G era.”

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X20 modem, which also claims to offer maximum speeds of 1.2GBps, supports up to five carrier aggregation.

Carrier aggregation is being used by an increasing number of operators globally to boost data rates and overall network quality.

The UK’s EE is using three carrier aggregation as it rolls out Gigabit LTE on its network.

TIM recently achieved speeds of 1GBps on its network in Italy by aggregating licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands.