Telekom Austria has launched carrier aggregation in its home market and Slovenia, offering customers speeds up to 300MBps in selected areas.
Ericsson has helped the operator’s Austrian subsidiary A1 to aggregate 20MHz in both the 800MHz and 2600MHz bands. The project integrates bands that were purchased during the autumn 2013 spectrum auction and represent the first time a 20MHz chunk has been aggregated across 800MHz and 2600MHz, the operator claimed.
Graz will be the first area to benefit from the higher speeds, with the operator already starting a base station upgrade programme in busy areas.
In six cities across Slovenia, TA’s Si.mobil subsidiary will bring carrier aggregation to selected areas. The operator is aiming for 75 percent LTE population coverage by the end of this year. Ljubljana and Maribor were the first cities to get the upgraded network.
Günther Ottendorfer, CTO Telekom Austria Group, said: “Network rollout is in full swing and with LTE Carrier Aggregation A1 and Si.mobil offer a further milestone by bringing this future-proof technology to our customers.”
He added: “With LTE Carrier Aggregation we are taking an important step to provide our customers higher transmission rates and expand current capacities, allowing even more customers to experience the new LTE speeds. I’m particularly delighted that the LTE development in the Austrian and the Slovenian network represents a perfect example of how knowledge transfer and the exchange of experiences within the Group can function and how single subsidiaries can reap considerable benefits from Group synergies and technological know-how transfer.”
Ericsson said the project would “significantly” improve indoor coverage in Austria, as well as increase the quality of video and enterprise services.
Valter D’Avino, Head of Ericsson Region Western & Central Europe, commented: “This is an important step in the evolution of today’s mobile networks towards LTE Advanced. The peak data rates in A1 network climb up to 300 Mbit/s and in the future with LTE Advanced up to 1 Gbit/s in a cell will be possible.”
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