SK Telecom and Qualcomm have completed the first over-the-air trial of enhanced licensed assisted access (eLAA) utilizing both licensed and unlicensed spectrum.
eLAA aggregates licensed and unlicensed spectrum across the uplink as well as the downlink. Conventional LAA technology uses unlicensed spectrum on the downlink only.
During the trial at SK Telecom's corporate R&D center in Bundang, Korea, SK Telecom and Qualcomm combined 2.6-GHz licensed spectrum and 5-GHz unlicensed spectrum.
A baseline was established using only WiFi connections, and some of these were then switched to LAA or eLAA while others remained on WiFi.
Users remaining on WiFi were unaffected by the connections that switched to LAA, demonstrated that the listen-before-talk mechanism was effective at preventing interference.
Testing also showed that LAA and eLAA were able to achieve twice the capacity in 5-GHz than the Wi-Fi only baseline connections.
"A flexible combination between licensed and unlicensed spectrum is necessary to enable high quality massive 5G service,” SK Telecom head of network technology Jin Hyo Park said.
“We will lead the network innovation towards LTE-A Pro and 5G including combining licensed and unlicensed spectrum technologies such as eLAA and MPTCP."