The demonstration utilised three carriers in two bands in a radio access network and used commercial-grade chipsets. Swedish vendor Ericsson supplied the software and hardware needed to aggregate the two LTE standards while Qualcomm Technologies developed the chipset for the test and commercial devices.
“With this combination of the two LTE modes we are the first provider in Europe to offer a completely new combination of technologies,” said Heinz Herren, CTO of Swisscom. “Our customers will benefit significantly from more capacity and higher data rates in our mobile network.”
In addition to enhancing the capacity of the network, the combination of the three carriers in FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE is also said to enable more users to benefit from peak data rates for downloads and uploads.
Swisscom plans to roll out the service to subscribers in the country’s metropolitan areas by 2016 to meet the needs of three-carrier FDD/TDD smartphones.
