Vodafone Netherlands on Wednesday announced the successful trial of LTE licence assisted access (LAA), achieving download speeds exceeding 274 Mbps.
The trial, which took place on Tuesday in partnership with Ericsson and Qualcomm, saw Vodafone combine 20 MHz of licensed 1800-MHz spectrum with 20 MHz of unlicensed 5-GHz spectrum, which is also used for services like WiFi.
"Adding unlicensed spectrum to our existing licensed spectrum will enable us to use spectrum more efficiently and increase the capacity of [the] Vodafone network," said Li Lin, who is responsible for in-building solu tions, LAA, and LTE and Wi-Fi aggregation at Vodafone, in a blog post on Wednesday.
"The 5-GHz unlicensed spectrum band, targeted using this licence assisted access technique, is less crowded than licensed bands, with up to 600 MHz of spectrum available," he said. "That means our customers would be able to download data faster, a particular benefit when undertaking demanding online activity, such as watching videos or playing games."
There is concern in some quarters that technology like LAA may have a detrimental effect on the performance of unlicensed services, particularly in the U.S., where the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sought comments on the issue. It has yet to publish its findings.
"Unlicensed spectrum can be shared among different technologies. In the trial we were pleased that LTE achieved good co-existence with the existing WiFi system," said Lin on Wednesday.
He insisted that Vodafone is developing LAA within 3GPP standards, which aim to "ensure fair shared use among the multiple users and technologies (e.g.WiFi) that access the unlicensed bands."
