Ericsson, with Vodafone and Qualcomm, today conducted live testing of advanced LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA) of LTE in licensed and unlicensed bands on a commercial mobile network.  The trial uses the Ericsson RBS 6402 indoor small cell, which supports LTE CA between licensed and unlicensed bands on Vodafone's commercial network, connected to a LTE unlicensed band capable test device developed by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

The Vodafone LTE trials with unlicensed spectrum are being conducted over Vodafone's network in the Netherlands.  The latest over the air results were achieved by aggregating 20 MHz of Vodafone spectrum in Band 3 (1800 MHz) with 20 MHz of the unlicensed 5 GHz band U-NII-1 band.  The testing validated LTE performance in the unlicensed band and fair co-existence with other technologies like Wi-Fi within the unlicensed 5 GHz band.  The Ericsson RBS 6402 Indoor Picocell includes a 5GHz LTE enabled radio in addition to multiple LTE radio variants and optional 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi module.  The user equipment utilized in this trial is a test device powered by the Qualcomm® Snapdragon(TM) X12 LTE modem. 

LTE CA with an unlicensed band enables operators to combine the reliability of LTE licensed spectrum with incremental downlink throughput improvements provided by the unlicensed band.  The functionality includes mechanisms for sharing the unlicensed spectrum with other unlicensed 5 GHz users, like Wi-Fi.  This allows operators to leverage unlicensed 5 GHz spectrum for improved peak rates and capacity.  LTE CA with the 5GHz unlicensed band is a feature of Ericsson Networks Software 16A, available this year.