NTT DOCOMO, has announced that it has successfully completed an outdoor-commercial testing of its Advanced C-RAN network that increases radio capacity and transmission speed at high traffic areas such as train stations and large-scale commercial facilities. The C-RAN technology promises to achieve a 240Mbps downlink using 35MHz bandwidth.
According to NTT DOCOMO, the successful outcome of the verification paves way for the commercial deployment of the technology during the launch of DOCOMO's LTE-Advanced network in March. The verification was conducted using category-6 mobile devices capable of download speeds of up to 300Mbps.
Japan's largest mobile service provider, with over 60 million subscribers said that the Advanced C-RAN is a network based on a concept proposed by DOCOMO in 2013 that leverages carrier aggregation (CA) technology to enable users to receive data simultaneously over small cells for localized coverage deployed in congested areas, and macro cells that provide a wider area coverage.
Seizo Onoe, DOCOMO's Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
Advanced C-RAN represents an important contribution to the evolution of LTE and will be a key technology for the realization of 5G in the future,.