Dubai: The UAE’s telecom operators, etisalat and du, are both aiming to create high-speed mobile broadband throughput to gain competitive edge.
Etisalat announced two days ago that it has tested and begun a phased upgrade of its network to 4G LTE Advanced (LTE-A) tri-band technology based on carrier aggregation technology, for the first time in the region with speeds of 700Mbps.
Du on Monday announced that it become the first in the world to demonstrate peak throughput over its 4G LTE-Advanced network with speeds of 900Mbps on carrier aggregation technology.
What is carrier aggregation technology?
“Carrier aggregation combines different spectrum transmission bandwidths and is one of several features in LTE Advanced that lets mobile operators bond together disparate spectrum bands to add capacity and provide faster data rates in their networks. It is the next development of LTE,” Bhanu Chaddha, telecommunications research manager at International Data Corporation (IDC), told Gulf News.
He said that the speeds tested will not be commercially available, it depends on the spectrum, configuration and the technology they have used.
LTE carrier aggregation is the next step in the evolution of high-speed mobile broadband services, enabling operators to make the most of their existing spectrum assets by combining multiple spectrum bands to enable higher mobile broadband download speeds.
He said that there are no mobile devices available in the market that can support these speeds.
The commonly available smartphones can support speeds of up to 150Mbps but there are some phones with can support speeds of up to 300Mbps.
Using LTE Advanced carrier aggregation, he said that it is possible to utilise more than one carrier and in this way increase the overall transmission bandwidth.