South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT) and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI) have announced what they claim is the first over-the-air technology demonstration of Enhanced Licensed Assisted Access (eLAA) and Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) utilising both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. With LAA using unlicensed spectrum to boost the data speed in the downlink direction only, as an evolution of that technology eLAA reportedly increases data speeds in both uplink and downlink by aggregating licensed and unlicensed spectrum to create a wider data pipe in both directions.
In a press release confirming the development, the companies noted that demonstration used 2.6GHz of licensed spectrum and 5GHz of unlicensed spectrum. Having established a baseline using only Wi-Fi users, some of these were then switched from Wi-Fi to LAA/eLAA. According to the companies, the trial demonstrated that those users that remained on Wi-Fi were unaffected by those that switched to LAA/eLAA, leading to the suggestion that this effectively showed that LAA/eLAA shares the unlicensed spectrum fairly with Wi-Fi. With regards to performance, it was noted that LAA and eLAA were shown in multiple test cases to achieve twice the capacity in 5GHz compared to the Wi-Fi only baseline.
Commenting on the development, Jin Hyo Park, head of network technology at SKT, was cited as saying: ‘A flexible combination between licensed and unlicensed spectrum is necessary to enable high quality massive 5G service … We will lead the network innovation towards LTE-A Pro and 5G including combining licensed and unlicensed spectrum technologies such as eLAA and Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP).’