SK Telecom and Ericsson announced on Tuesday that they have successfully demonstrated a small cell that drastically reduces inter-cell interference.
The two companies are pitching it as a candidate 5G technology because it uses a radio frame structure and interference control technology that they claim is fundamentally different to LTE and offers much higher data rates.
Deploying small cells in vast numbers is seen by many as an important means of meeting future demand for data. However, interference is caused when the reference signals from adjacent cells overlap.
"SK Telecom is delighted to announce the successful development of the 5G small cell system that tackles the root cause of inter-cell interference," said Alex Jinsung Choi, SK Telecom’s chief technology officer, in a statement.
"With the development of the 5G small cell system, an enabling technology for 5G, we move one step closer to realizing the commercialisation of 5G," added Thomas Norén, vice president and head of radio product management of Ericsson.
Meanwhile, in a separate announcement, Ericsson and Qualcomm claimed the first implementation of FDD/TDD carrier aggregation in a commercial network by Vodafone Portugal.
The operator is currently trialling it using 15 MHz of FDD 1800-MHz spectrum and 20 MHz of TDD 2.6-GHz spectrum.
"Combining TDD with low-band FDD spectrum will improve the high-band TDD coverage area, and the TDD spectrum will significantly improve the overall downlink throughput. With global availability of TDD spectrum, we regard FDD/TDD carrier aggregation as a key technology to further improve user experience for customers worldwide," said Per Narvinger, head of LTE at Ericsson.
FDD/TDD carrier aggregation requires only a software update on Ericsson’s part. However, it also needs devices with compatible chipsets, which is where Qualcomm Technologies comes in. Its Snapdragon 810 processor X10 LTE supports carrier aggregation between FDD and TDD signals.
"We are delighted to work with Ericsson and Vodafone on the latest LTE-Advanced multimode solutions and to deliver consumers an improved mobile broadband experience," said Enrico Salvatori, president of Qualcomm Europe.
