Lithuanian mobile operator Omnitel has announced that it has taken ‘a major step towards 5G’, by implementing Huawei’s LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) Pro technology, and demonstrating data download speeds of 750Mbps. According to a press release from the TeliaSonera-owned company, with LTE-A Pro, data is transmitted by combining four different frequency bands, the latest signal encoding technologies and the four-channel transmission technology. Under laboratory conditions, LTE-A Pro can reach download speeds of almost 1Gbps.
’4.5G, which has been implemented in the network of Omnitel, will become available to users immediately as soon as there are devices supporting this technology,’ commented the operator’s chief technology officer, Andrius Semeskevicius, adding: ‘At present, the existing communication technologies are absolutely sufficient for the services demanding higher mobile internet speeds, but we are thinking about the future when the internet will connect not only people and cars, but also things. All Omnitel 4G users will now feel the benefit of 4.5G technology, because it increases the capacity of the current 4G network.’