Singapore's M1 and Huawei have announced they achieved 4G peak download speeds exceeding 1Gbps during a trial at M1's LTE-A test lab.
The demonstration also achieved peak upload speeds of over 130Mbps, marking the first time Huawei and an operator partner have achieved such a high combined download and upload speeds during a trial.
It was performed using commercial Huawei hardware and a prototype LTE-A CAT14 device.
For the trial, the companies integrated four advanced networking technologies - three component carrier aggregation, two component carrier uplink aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and higher order modulation 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM).
M1 CTO Denis Seek said the demonstration shows that the industry will be able to further stretch the capabilities of 4G technologies prior to the advent of 5G.
“With more customers uploading and sharing content on social media and other channels, it is equally important to ensure we can deliver higher upload speeds. For this reason, we are also testing technology to deliver increased mobile upload speeds, to ensure we can meet their expectations,” he said.
Huawei president of LTE networks Wan Jun added that the trial marks the beginning of the 4.5G era in Singapore.