Nokia announces Finnish and Saudi LTE-A rollouts

Nokia Networks has claimed advancements in LTE-A network deployment by demonstrating live network speeds and data transmission rates of up to 300 Mbps on TeliaSonera’s LTE network in Helsinki. By utilising FDD/TDD technology, it is claiming carrier aggregation of the 1800 and 2600 MHz frequency bands for the Finnish operator.

It has also announced carrier aggregation cooperation with Saudi Arabian telco STC, with compatibility with commercial chipsets, on the same frequency bands.

Carrier aggregation is a key enabling technology for LTE-A as it allows operators to utilise available spectrum more efficiently. Albeit limited, the roll-out of LTE-A in selected parts of Helsinki has the potential to achieve data transmission speeds faster than a lot of fixed, residential broadband infrastructure.

Due to ever-increasing customer demand for mobile data services on the move, TeliaSonera Finland’s CTO, Kaley Reiljan believes LTE-A can help future-proof telco’s network for demand in the coming years.

“We want to offer the fastest possible data speeds to our customers,” he said. “Over 60% of Finns use smartphones and generate more data traffic than customers using older devices. With LTE-Advanced we make sure our network can address these capacity changes now and in the future.”

Nokia’s Head of the STC Customer Team, Hani Dib, concurs with Reiljan’s conclusion that ever-increasing customer data consumption is a core motivator for moving towards LTE-A. However, Dib believes spectrum efficiency and maximum utilisation should be the primary consideration for operators.

“We believe that the optimal use of spectrum is key to satisfying ever-increasing subscriber demand for network capacity and speed,” he said. “Our achievement with STC will encourage other operators globally to look at this kind of spectrum convergence to save costs and increase throughput.”

The news comes as Nokia, Ooredoo and China Mobile claimed carrier aggregation speeds of 4.1 Gbps last week.

Learn more about LTE-A in the Middle East at next year’s LTE MENA conference, 11-13 May 2015. http://mena.lteconference.com/