LAA is an LTE-Advanced technology designed to improve mobile data speeds and reduce congestion, and will be available in Ericsson’s small cell portfolio from Q4 2015.
The technology will allow for carrier aggregation of licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands to enable the growth of indoor data traffic, and carriers such as T-Mobile expect it to aid the delivery of an innovative mobile service.
“There’s approximately 550MHz of under-utilised spectrum in the 5GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) band and LAA is one of the technologies we plan to develop and use in our continuing efforts to provide our customers with superior network performance,” said Neville Ray, CTO at T-Mobile.
LAA is expected to provide a speed increase of up to 150Mbps for smartphone users, and allows both Wifi and LAA users to have equal access to the spectrum.
“The License Assisted Access that Ericsson is integrating into its small cell portfolio clearly foreshadows the 5G future,” added Peter Jarich, VP of consumer and infrastructure services.
“Ultimately, it's all about optimising the network to support diverse consumer applications, diverse user locations (indoors and outdoors), and diverse device types – including future IoT (internet of Things) demands.”
