The Philippines' Smart Communications and Australia's Telstra have this week both announced results of recent LTE-Advanced trials.
Smart, the mobile unit of the Philippines' PLDT, revealed it has commenced testing LTE-A using equipment provided by Huawei.
The operator has already conducted some trials at test facilities, achieving downlink transmission speeds of 209 Mbps. In the test setup, LTE-Advanced was also deployed over Wi-Fi.
PLDT and Smart group head Rolando G. Peña said the company plans for LTE-Advanced to work “hand-in-glove” with the operator's 71,000km fiber footprint to provide a high-quality broadband experience.
Smart's announcement came days after Ericsson revealed that Telstra had completed the first commercial LTE-Advanced call using carrier aggregation technology on the 1800-MHz and 900-MHz bands.
The trial took place on July 31, but was only made public this week. Data was transferred across its live network on a number of sites in Queensland.
“Telstra's LTE subscriber numbers are growing dramatically, with nearly 3 million subscribers currently using the LTE network, up from 2.1 million six months ago,” Telstra executive director for networks Mike Wright said.
“The capacity, higher data speeds and efficiencies provided by LTE-Advanced will help manage growth in data traffic. When we get access to 700MHz spectrum in 2015 we also intend to deploy the next-generation of LTE-Advanced by combining larger blocks of spectrum in the 700-MHz and 1800-MHz bands.”
Telstra revealed in February that it aims to start deploying LTE-Advanced this year.