Turkcell, Ericsson and Qualcomm have successfully demoed the live 3-Carrier High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (3C-HSDPA) on a commercial network. The test utilized a feature that will be included in Ericsson's software release 15A and was conducted on a smartphone powered by a Qualcomm processor with its integrated Qualcommmodem.  

Three-Carrier HSDPA is engineered to increase user speeds for downlink by up to 50 percent throughout the entire cell compared to single carrier. The demo recorded 63 Mbps downlink. The demonstration was performed in the 2.1GHz band in a WCDMA commercial network using three 5 MHz carriers for downlink and two 5MHz carriers for uplink, which were all within the 2.1GHz frequency band that is owned by Turkcell. The trial used core network and radio access network nodes supplied by Ericsson.

Turkcell currently has a Dual-Carrier HSDPA network supporting speeds of up to 43.2 Mbps in downlink and 5.76 Mbps in uplink.

The demonstration also included Enhanced Uplink Multi-carrier (EUL-MC), an Ericsson software release 14B feature. During the demo, uplink speed improvements of 100 percent were recorded.

According to Ericsson, EUL-MC is designed to allow simultaneous uplink transmissions on two 5MHz carriers to a single user offering peak rates of up to 11.5 Mbps and up to 100% gain in user speed. This gain is present regardless of load conditions and in the entire network - both cell-center and cell-edge.

3C-HSDPA and EUL-MC are the next steps in HSPA multi-carrier evolution, a promising technology for app coverage. Using software upgrades, multi-carrier is designed to increase capacity, increase peak rates and improve app coverage substantially. Both these technologies are major steps in improving the mobile broadband experience for users and they are anticipated to be commercially available in devices during the second half of 2014.