Nokia and T-Mobile have achieved LTE speeds near 1 Gbps in a demonstration using Nokia’s deployed 4.5G Pro technology. The demonstration, conducted at T-Mobile’s lab in Bellevue, Washington, encompassed technologies currently live in the operator’s network, including carrier aggregation, 256 QAM

Nokia and T-Mobile have achieved LTE speeds near 1 Gbps in a demonstration using Nokia’s deployed 4.5G Pro technology. The demonstration, conducted at T-Mobile’s lab in Bellevue, Washington, encompassed technologies currently live in the operator’s network, including carrier aggregation, 256 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and 4×4 MIMO (Multiple Input and Multiple Output) on Nokia’s commercially available radio access hardware. 

With Category 16 (Cat 16) capable devices becoming commercially available in early 2017, the solution enables an even faster network for T-Mobile. Currently, the network provides speeds up to 400 Mbps.

T-Mobile has already launched 4×4 MIMO, carrier aggregation and 256 QAM modulation to provide ultra-high speed services to its subscribers nationwide. With the availability of Cat 16 devices, it will be possible to achieve nearly 1 Gbps speeds when combining all three of the technologies, which the joint demonstration of Nokia’s 4.5G Pro successfully proved.

Demo solution included three-carrier aggregation technology using Bands 2 and 66; 4X4 MIMO technology for doubling peak speeds; 256 QAM, which is a higher order modulation scheme that allows an increase in peak data rates of up to 30% compared to 64 QAM; Nokia commercial LTE eNodeB.