TeliaSonera’s Norwegian arm NetCom has reached 1 Gbps in a live demonstration of LTE Advanced Pro, carried out in partnership with Huawei.
LTE Advanced Pro is the official name given to LTE Release 13. Approved by the 3GPP in late October, it has also been referred to as 4.5G.
Pitched as an interim step between 4G and 5G, LTE Advanced Pro is designed to handle vastly more connections per cell – important for IoT services – reduce latency, and support technologies like licensed assisted access (LAA) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), among others.
In early November, 3 Hong Kong and Huawei achieved a 1 Gbps peak connection speed on a hybrid FDD/TDD network in a demonstration at Huawei’s Global Mobile Broadband (MBB) Forum in Hong Kong.
In NetCom’s live demonstration in Oslo this week, carried out under real-world conditions, the telco aggregated four carriers of spectrum in the 800 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2.1 GHz, and 2.6 GHz bands.
"Today we have shown the future of mobile networks and a taste of what we can expect on our way to 5G, says Abraham Foss, CEO of TeliaSonera Norway, in a statement.
"What we witnessed today is only the beginning of the 4.5G era of wireless communications, where 1 Gbps will be the new mobile broadband network rate benchmark," added Yang Chaobin, CMO of Huawei’s wireless product line.
TeliaSonera seems to have temporarily forgotten the difference between a byte and a bit though.
Its statement claims that its 1-Gbps LTE Advanced Pro network is capable of downloading a 1 GB movie in just 1 second. However, a gigabyte is approximately eight times larger than a gigabit, and therefore it would take at least eight seconds to download a gigabyte on a 1-Gbps network.
Update 11:15 GMT: Since this article was published, TeliaSonera has been in touch with Total Telecom and corrected its press release.
