ZTE has announced successful demonstration of time-division long term evolution (TD-LTE) downlink three-carrier aggregation (3x CA) in collaboration with China Mobile and Qualcomm Technologies. 

This demonstration was conducted using ZTE’s TD-LTE eNodeB and evolved packet core (EPC) devices, based on terminals powered by the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 810 processor with X10 LTE modem. Three 20 MHz carriers in the 2.6GHz time division duplexing (TDD) frequency band were aggregated, and the downlink data throughput rate reached 330Mbps. This shows that 3x CA is mature and can meets commercial deployment requirements.

CA is a core technology used in LTE-Advanced, which allows two or more carriers in the same or different frequency bands to be aggregated into one channel. This helps to increase peak TD-LTE cell rates in a multiple manner, effectively avoiding co-channel interference, improving TD-LTE network performance, more flexibly balancing loads between the primary cell and secondary cells and increasing network capacity. By using the CA technology, operators can provide mobile users with higher speed and more diverse service experience, better coping with the explosive growth of data traffic, and enhancing TD-LTE network competitiveness.