Bell Canada has announced that its LTE-A mobile network has delivered data speeds of 1Gbps in recent tests in Mississauga, Ontario. Bell CTO Stephen Howe said that the enhanced LTE-A network boasts theoretical peak speed of 1.5Gbps and will be rolled out to locations throughout the country in 2018 as smartphones that support the higher speeds come to market.
To boost LTE-A speeds to Gigabit levels, Bell is employing a combination of carrier aggregation (CA) and 4×4 MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology to increase spectrum efficiency and multiply capacity. Bell will also support Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology to aggregate unlicensed 5GHz spectrum with LTE in licensed bands to provide higher transfer speeds. Last year Bell claimed a ‘North American first’ with the launch of quad-band CA to raise its theoretical LTE-A peak speed to 750Mbps.