Russian cellco Beeline, Huawei and Qualcomm have announced the completion of LTE testing in the unlicensed 5GHz spectrum band, known as LTE Licensed Assisted Access (LTE-LAA). The testing was conducted within the framework of the memorandum on joint testing and launch of 5G technologies, signed by Beeline (registered as PJSC Vimpelcom, part of the VEON group) and Huawei in October 2016. The LTE-LAA tests combined two 20MHz spectrum blocks in the unlicensed 5GHz band with 10MHz of licensed 2600MHz (Band 7) frequencies, achieving download speeds to the end user of 480Mbps on a mobile test device using a Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 LTE modem supporting LAA. It is expected that the first commercial subscriber devices supporting LTE-LAAwill be available by the end of 2017.