UAE's largest mobile operator, du Friday announced that it has started the deployment of LTE Advanced (LTE-A) technology with carrier aggregation supporting CAT 6 (300Mbps) on its network. The 4G+ service which was launched March this year is being rolled out in its initial implementation phase at football venues which record high traffic volumes during events and will be followed by further deployments in other high demand areas.
du said that the introduction of 4G+ will almost double the throughput and speed of broadband services, thus decreasing latency and time to content, providing superior user experience from faster streaming and downloading and loading times, especially for rich content. The service will benefit users that have CAT6 supported smartphones such as the Huawei Honor 6 & Honor 6 Plus, Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 Edge & Samsung Note 4 and LG G Flex2 that support 4G speeds of 300Mbps. Cat 6 smartphones offer twice the speed compared to CAT 4 smartphones such as Huawei Ascend P2, LG Nexus 5, and Apple’s iPhone 6.
In its statement, du said that it has in July last year, tested the LTE-Advanced with carrier aggregation over its commercial network, achieving 300 Mbps peak throughput by combining band 20 (800 MHz) and band 3 (1800 MHz). The operator also said that it has successfully demonstrated speeds of 900 Mbps on its LTE network at the GITEX 2014, where it combined 3 carriers using MIMO 4x4 technology.
Saleem AlBlooshi, Executive Vice President, Network Development and Operations, du
The rollout of the 4G+ network is an important step on the road to 5G evolution. While we follow the technological evolution, concurrently we are evaluating the possible 5G features and technologies with our vendors, in line with the tentative timeline imposed by global standardisation bodies that 5G technology should be rolled out in 2020. While there are not many CAT 6 supported devices on the market today, we anticipate both a market and user increase of these devices, hence the rollout of 4G+ is an important business strategy placing du as one of the region’s pioneers with regards to its network capabilities.
