Japan’s leading carrier, NTT DoCoMo, said Monday that it is gearing up to test LTE Advanced with an eye to racking up speeds of 1Gbps on the downlink.

The company was pre-licensed by the Kanto Bureau of Telecommunications of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to carry out field experiments of LTE Advanced back in January. Once the licence is issued, DoCoMo will begin field experiments in real radio environments in the cities of Yokosuka and Sagamihara in Kanagawa Prefecture, in both indoor and outdoor trials.

Using radio environment simulators in its R&D centre, DoCoMo said it has achieved transmission data rates of approximately 1Gbps in the downlink and 200Mbps in the uplink.

Standardization of LTE-Advanced is currently being finalized by the3GPP and in October was accepted by the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) as a technology compliant with the requirements of IMT-Advanced.