3 Hong Kong and Huawei on Wednesday announced they achieved a 1 Gbps peak connection speed on a hybrid FDD/TDD network in a demonstration of what Huawei calls ‘4.5G’ technology.
The companies aggregated altogether 60 MHz of spectrum in four carriers split between three frequency bands: paired 1800 MHz and 2.6 GHz spectrum, and unpaired 2.3 GHz spectrum. They used 4×4 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multi-antenna technology to significantly increase peak downlink rates.
The demonstration was made during Huawei’s Global Mobile Broadband (MBB) Forum, which is taking place in Hong Kong this week.
"3 Hong Kong and Huawei will continue to innovate and bring new mobile technologies to Hong Kong," said Peter Wong, CEO of 3 Hong Kong parent Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong Holdings (HTHKH), in a statement.
He said 3 Hong Kong plans to refarm its 900 MHz spectrum and 2.1 GHz spectrum in order to roll out five-component carrier (5CC) aggregation, "further boosting the peak download rate to around 1.3 Gbps."
Huawei is a big backer of so-called 4.5G.
The Chinese vendor says 4.5G network technologies will allow for up to 100,000 connections per cell, latency of less than 10 milliseconds, and speeds of up to 1 Gbps over mobile networks. It expects the first commercial deployments to take place next year.
"Huawei and 3 Hong Kong have been partners for 18 years," noted Huawei’s rotating CEO Ken Hu. "We are honoured to work and grow with 3 Hong Kong to ensure that mobile broadband will continue to flourish in Hong Kong."
