Australia's Telstra has teamed up with Ericsson on a successful trial of LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation (CA), achieving speeds of up to 300Mbps.
The companies reached the speeds by aggregating 20 MHz of 1800-MHz spectrum and 20 MHz from the 2600-MHz band.
Telstra bid A$1.3 billion ($1.18 billion) for new LTE-compatible spectrum during Australia's 'digital dividend' spectrum auction in May. The company secured 20 MHz of 700-MHz spectrum and 40 MHz in the 2.5-GHz band.
Telstra executive director for Networks Mike Wright said these LTE-A trials are an important first step towards deploying Cat 6 LTE-A CA once the new 700-MHz spectrum is made available at the beginning of 2015.
"The trials we [just] conducted demonstrate the ability to aggregate two channels of 20 MHz spectrum on our commercial network,” he said.
“While the download speeds we achieved of 300 Mbps are very impressive, for Telstra the main outcome is that we will be able to build out the capacity in our network to manage the future wireless data needs of our customers.”
The trial comes weeks after SK Telecom conducted a demonstration of 225Mbps LTE-A using 30 Mbps of aggregated 1.8-GHz and 800-MHz spectrum.
The operator plans to launch the upgraded LTE service in 2H14, and is already researching aggregating three spectrum bands to deliver 300Mbps LTE-A services.