Japan's NTT DoCoMo, not one to sit back and wait for equipment vendors to develop products to fulfil its needs, has developed an LTE-compatible multi-band indoor base station and antenna.
DoCoMo began installing the new base stations and antennas for commercial service yesterday. The technology supports the 1.5-GHz and 1.7-GHz as well as the conventional 2-GHz band.
The BTS and antenna are capable of supporting DoCoMo's 150Mbps LTE services, which are currently available in parts of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Aichi, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo.
They are also compatible with LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation technology as well as W-CDMA and LTE. DoCoMo intends to launch 225Mbps LTE-A by the financial year ending March 2016.
DoCoMo said its new multi-band antenna is about the same size as its current single-band antennas, so it can replace existing installations using the same space.