Crazy-fast 1Gbps LTE-U live demo from MTN

MTN South Africa recently announced it had partnered with Huawei to trial 1Gbps LTE in unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U) technology in South Africa.

Calling the technology 4.5G, MTN said it aggregated three carriers, used multiple antennas, and a specific modulation scheme to achieve the result.

Krishna Chetty, acting CTO at MTN South Africa, said they used a single 15MHz carrier of their licensed spectrum in the 2,100MHz band, and two 20MHz carriers in the unlicensed 5GHz band.

5GHz is also used for Wi-Fi.

In addition to aggregating three carriers, MTN and Huawei employed a 4-transmitter, 4-receiver antenna configuration and used 256 quadrature amplitude modulation.

To prove they can reach 1Gbps in a live test, MTN conducted a demonstration at its switching centre in Centurion – as shown in the image posted below.

Chetty said their core network is not yet capable of carrying 1Gbps traffic from Huawei radio equipment, so they conducted the demonstration over a local network.

No commercial devices are available for the technology yet, but operators believe handsets that support LTE-U speeds of 200Mbps or more will be available by the middle of 2016.

MTN 1Gbps LTE-U live trial

More on MTN

Free Vodacom and MTN data for Absa app

MTN in talks to launch virtual network operator services

How MTN is going to double LTE speeds on its network

MTN promises massive network investment in 2016