Ericsson demos LTE Advanced in Sweden

While many countries LTE plans are still at the drawing board stage the ever eager Swedish are already getting a taste of its successor, LTE Advanced. This week Ericsson demonstrated LTE Advanced running over a test network in Kista, Sweden.

The test was performed using frequencies provided by the Swedish regulator the Post and Telecom Agency (PTS) and was used to demonstrate LTE Advanced capabilities such as extended multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) and carrier aggregation, which saw three blocks of 20MHz combined in an LTE environment for the first time. The result, Ericsson said, was speeds some ten times faster than Swedish consumers currently enjoy from current commercial LTE services.

Urban Landmark, head of spectrum department of the PTS, said in a statement; “Sweden is in the forefront when it comes to usage of mobile broadband. Sweden was both early with licensing of harmonized spectrum in the 2.6GHz and 800MHz bands, and the first country in the world where LTE was commercially deployed. The demonstration today indicates that mobile broadband technologies continue to evolve rapidly.”

Ericsson said that it expects commercial deployment of LTE Advanced in Sweden as soon as 2013.

“The next step of LTE enhances the current service offering, performance and data speed even further. It provides operators with the opportunity to capitalize further on their existing infrastructure. Once again, Ericsson is committed to supporting operators’ needs as expectations and requirements for mobile broadband services increase,” said Ulf Ewaldsson, Ericsson’s vice president and head of product area radio.

Ericsson said that the demo was made using its current commercial multi-mode, multi-standard, RBS 6000 radio base station and fully complied with 3GPP’s Release 10 global standard for LTE.  Live traffic was streamed between the RBS and a moving van from which network performance could be monitored. In the demonstration, 60MHz of aggregated bandwidth was used, and 8×8 MIMO was used on the downlink.

The LTE North America World Summit 2011 conference takes place on the 8-9 November 2011