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Danish incumbent aims for 2017 commercial rollout.
TDC this week became the latest to telco to test out LTE-Advanced Pro, hitting a peak throughput of 1 Gbps.
The Danish incumbent and its hardware partner Huawei aggregated three carriers and used 4×4 multiple input, multiple output (MIMO), and 256-QAM to reach the headline-grabbing speed. Technologies like 256-QAM and massive MIMO are among the technologies referenced in 3GPP’s LTE Release 13, also known as LTE-A Pro, or 4.5G.
"We at TDC Group [have] taken a giant step towards the next generation [of] mobile networks," said Peter Trier Schleidt, TDC’s chief operating officer, in a statement on Thursday.
TDC is the latest in a string of operators to share their LTE-A Pro plans recently.
South Korea’s SK Telecom in May said it plans to begin a limited roll out of the technology this month, with a view to covering all metropolitan areas by 2018 and 90% of the population by 2019.
Swisscom tested LTE-A Pro in April in preparation for a commercial launch in early 2017.
In December 2015, Telia’s Norwegian subsidiary Netcom also carried out a 1-Gbps LTE-A Pro test.
For its part, TDC said LTE-A Pro technology is in its infancy, but added that it expects it to become widely available during the course of 2017. At the same time, device makers will begin to launch compatible smartphones and tablets, the operator predicted.
"Customers do no need this advanced technology today, but we will be ready as soon as the rest of the industry moves," Schleidt said.
