Swisscom is provided by Ericsson the Europe’s first fully commercial LTE-Advanced three-carrier aggregation solution combining LTE in both FDD and TDD modes. The demonstration used three carriers in two bands in a radio access network and used commercial-grade chipsets.

Swisscom is provided by Ericsson the Europe’s first fully commercial LTE-Advanced three-carrier aggregation solution combining LTE in both FDD and TDD modes. The demonstration used three carriers in two bands in a radio access network and used commercial-grade chipsets. The Swiss operator deployed the solution on August 18, 2015 in a Swisscom shop in Zurich Switzerland and plans to roll it out to subscribers in Swiss metropolitan areas by summer 2016, to coincide with three carrier FDD/TDD smartphone availability.

For the demonstration in Swisscom’s live commercial network, two LTE TDD carriers each with 20 MHz bandwidth in the 2.6 GHz frequency band (B41) and one LTE FDD carrier with 15 MHz in the 2.1 GHz band (B1) were used. The live demonstration in Zürich was supported by Ericsson Radio Access Network software 15B and hardware as well as by the Snapdragon X12 LTE modem. The Snapdragon X12 LTE modem is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated. The combination of the three carriers in FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE will enhance the future capacity of the network significantly. The new technology will allow more users to benefit from the peak data rates for downloads and uploads when using mobile internet, entertainment or enterprise services. In this specific set-up, a maximum 335 Mbps in the downlink was achieved.