Airtel, Ericsson claim to achieve 500Mbps download speed on phones with new LAA tech

Both companies jointly conducted India’s first trial of Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology over a live 4G network

Airtel and Ericsson conduct India’s first LAA trial in a live network (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel and Swedish telecom gear maker Ericsson on Friday claimed to have achieved broadband download speed of 500 Megabits per second (Mbps) on smartphones during live trial of a new technology.

"During the trial, data download speeds of over 500 Mbps were recorded on smartphones in an indoor environment. In outdoor environment, peak download speed of more than 400 Mbps was achieved with coverage of about 180 meters from the base station. The trial was conducted in Delhi-NCR," Airtel and Ericsson said in a joint statement.

Both companies jointly conducted India's first trial of Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology over a live 4G network. LAA is a key technology wherein operators evolve their networks to achieve gigabit LTE (4G) by opening up previously untapped resources of unlicensed spectrum delivering speeds once thought only possible over fiber.

LAA enables the use of unlicensed spectrum in the 5GHz band in combination with the licensed spectrum.

"Airtel used one LTE 5 MHz carrier aggregated with three 20 MHz carriers of unlicensed spectrum. Together with 4CC carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM technologies, the trial was conducted using Ericsson Radio System," the statement said.

Theoretically, a full high definition two-hour long video can be downloaded in about a minute and standard definition video in few seconds. Recently, the government freed around 550 Mhz of spectrum for public Wi-Fi and 5G services.