Development in carrier aggregation continues forward at Mobile World Congress 2023, where T-Mobile announced the aggregation of four channels in the field. Nokia, with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and T-Mobile, said they’d achieved the world’s first aggregation of five carriers (5CC) in a lab setting. The 5CC trial, which combined two frequency division duplex (FDD) and three time division duplex (TDD) carriers, resulted in peak downlink throughput speeds exceeding 4.2 Gbps.
In the field, the four-channel CA data call was made on a commercial device, combining mid‑band spectrum to hit a peak speed of 3.3 Gbps, Inside Towers reported. In this test, two channels of 2.5 GHz Ultra Capacity 5G and two channels of 1900 MHz spectrum were merged, creating an effective 225 MHz 5G channel.
“Carrier aggregation that is available in the lab today will probably be available in the field next year,” Joe Madden, Principal Analyst at Mobile Experts, told Inside Towers. “Then there must be an upgrade to the phones, which will take more time.”
The 5CC CA call was conducted on Nokia’s AirScale base station and a mobile test device powered by the new Snapdragon X75 5G Modem-RF System, one of the first to support 5G five-channel carrier aggregation. During the test, five component carriers on FDD bands n71 (600 MHz) and n25 (1900 MHz) and TDD bands n41 (2.5 GHz) and n77 (3.7 GHz) were aggregated. The uplink data rates were also accelerated with 5G uplink Carrier Aggregation on bands n25 and n77. The combination of uplink and downlink carrier aggregation allows operators to keep the uplink and downlink data rates in balance.
“Carrier Aggregation does allow the system to balance its capacity better so that more users can get reasonable speed all at the same time,” Madden said. “No individual user gets 4 Gbps, but if you want to have 40 users to each get 100 Mbps, then you need four gigabits total.”
First, carriers must transition to 5G Standalone networks and subscribers must migrate to 5G for the carriers to tap into an increasing pool of 5G FDD frequency carriers. They must then combine these with the bandwidth of multiple mid-band TDD carriers.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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