Singaporean telecommunications carrier Singtel has launched 450Mbps speeds across its entire 4G network for customers with compatible smartphones, and has also announced attaining speeds of up to 1Gbps in a trial of its 4G network with Ericsson.
The network upgrade was achieved by making use of 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technology, which increases efficient use of spectrum by increasing the number of unique radio waveform shapes to transport a third more data.
Initially, only Singtel customers with Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge handsets will be able to access the 450Mbps speeds, as can LG V20 users once the latter's upcoming software update is released.
Singtel and Ericsson also announced that a live trial, conducted to the east of Singapore in Pasir Ris, saw them attain speeds of 1Gbps across 4G using 256 QAM downlink combined with 4x4 Multiple Input Multiple Output (4x4 MIMO) and triple carrier aggregation.
Singtel said it plans to roll out 4x4 MIMO technology, which doubles the data paths between mobile phones and cellular base station to double download speeds, to high-traffic locations on its network next year.
"Achieving 1Gbps speeds on our live network marks a significant milestone in our journey to 5G," Singtel CEO of Consumer Singapore Yuen Kuan Moon added.
Ericsson and Singtel have been working on a "blueprint" for 5G deployment across Singapore since January 2015, signing a memorandum of understanding to "study the future of 5G networks and its applications" for consumers and enterprises.
In July last year, the two companies also completed a live trial of License Assisted Access (LAA) 4G, saying the mobile technology would boost network capacity and speeds indoors and would be rolled out over the next two years, beginning in the first half of 2017.
The trial involved two weeks of testing across several RBS 6402 indoor small cells, Wi-Fi access points, prototype LAA devices, and Wi-Fi devices, using 20MHz of the 1800MHz licensed spectrum band aggregated with 20MHz of the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum band over a live network inside an office premises in Serangoon North.
Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/singtel-upgrades-4g-to-450mbps-speeds-attains-1gbps-with-ericsson/