Vodafone has collaborated with Huewei and Qualcomm Technologies on a project in Turkey to improve user experience of its mobile customers by enabling faster download speeds using the License Assisted Access (LAA) technology, based on the 3GPP R13 standard.
The introduction of LAA on mobile networks will help. For example, this will help consumers to enjoy a more immersive experience when using virtual reality or augmented reality apps.
The LAA-ready network was tested using a Huawei Lampsite base station in Vodafone Turkey’s Arena Store in Istanbul. It uses 40MHz of unlicensed spectrum in 5GHz and 15MHz licensed spectrums in 2.6GHz for three carrier aggregation. The on-site peak download speed of 370Mbps was achieved using a Qualcomm® Snapdragon 835 processor with X16 LTE mobile test device.
The on-site test also showed that the spectral efficiency of LAA is higher than Wi-Fi when using the same 40MHz of spectrum. The test also showed that an LAA network can fairly coexist with Wi-Fi technology by supporting the 3GPP R13 standard for ’listen before talk’ technology.
3GPP's LAA standard was finalized in March 2016. Consumers can expect smartphones with support for LAA this year.
Ryan Ding, President of Huawei Products and Solutions
Faced with the large amount of unlicensed spectrum resources which are not fully used, Huawei and industry partners are using LAA technology to extend the LTE system to unlicensed band, which can help operators to improve the resources efficiency of unlicensed spectrum, and to improve network capacity of hotspot, and to ease the shortage of spectrum resources.
Santiago Tenorio, Head of Networks for Vodafone Group
LAA technology will help Vodafone to improve the experience our customers have. The LAA network fully reuses the existing core network, network management system and accounting system we use for 4G, and so will effectively improve our return on investment.
