Finland’s mobile service provider DNA is testing LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technology with Omnitele in a small cluster of DNA’s commercial 4G LTE network. The average bitrate over a short drive test run was 207 Mbps. The highest measured value peaked to 270 Mbps. Tests were conducted in a practical live network.

Finland’s mobile service provider DNA is testing LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technology with Omnitele in a small cluster of DNA’s commercial 4G LTE network. The average bitrate over a short drive test run was 207 Mbps. The highest measured value peaked to 270 Mbps. Tests were conducted in a practical live network.

In DNA network, LTE-A carrier aggregation rollout has been started and the feature is implemented in isolated locations. The technology will be more widely available during 2015.

LTE-A introduces a set of features improving the capacity and customer experience of mobile networks beyond the current 4G LTE networks. The capacity increase is to be achieved mainly with advanced multi-antenna techniques and LTE carrier aggregation. In the initial phase the theoretical peak bitrates are increased from 150 Mbps to 300 Mbps. This is achieved by combining two 20 MHz LTE carriers into a single wideband channel that can be allocated for a single user. Later on when the technology evolves, even 1000 Mbps can be reached by increasing the LTE-A bandwidth and number of MIMO antennas.

Omnitele sees 2015 to be the year for LTE-Advanced uptake and mass market emerge. Category-6 (300 Mbps) smartphones are already commercially available from Samsung and other big ones in the Android camp. Some Category 9 (450 Mbps) smartphones have also been released.