The demonstration was completed separately with the two operators using NSN’s Flexi Multiradio base station, and marks a breakthrough for improved capacity, coverage and speed.
“It gives us immense satisfaction to achieve the world’s first TDD-FDD carrier aggregation, and we are actively pursuing the 3GPP standardisation of the technology,” said Qi Zhang, VP of TD-LTE at NSN.
“We have been working hard with the leading Korean operators, KT and SKT, and this demonstration is yet further proof of our thought leadership in the commercialisation of LTE technology for wider adoption.”
As LTE subscriber numbers are rapidly increasing across the globe, operators are looking at new ways of expanding network capacity to meet bandwidth demands.
TDD-FDD carrier aggregation accumulates spectrum resources on multiple frequency bands of TD-LTE and FDD-LTE, meaning operators can increase throughput by 50-100% depending on availability.
“The significance of TDD-FDD carrier aggregation is that it provides the technical basis for faster and more efficient data services, combining TD-LTE technology which is becoming more and more widely adopted with FDD-LTE used in most networks today,” said Jin-hyo Park, SVP of networking technology R&D centre at SK Telecom.
TDD-FDD carrier aggregation also allows for load balancing between TD-LTE and FDD-LTE networks to ensure seamless mobile broadband coverage and optimal speeds.
Last week, NSN upgraded its small cell solution to enable it to act as a base station.
