Huawei’s 4G LTE Advanced Test – How Quad-Band Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 on EE's Network achieved 410MBps Download via inefficient Spectrum Aggregation

Many Telecom Providers are slowly warming up to the fact that customers want faster and fasters speed. The fastest iteration of 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) is LTE-Advanced Category 4 which is deployed in London, England as stated in the article “EE 4G in London gets a speed boost, but not on iPhone”, published 30 October 2014 11:59 am GMT by Luke Westaway, CNET News, which maxes out at 150Mbps and for which few devices actually exist

Apparently that's not fast enough.

Enter Huawei, Qualcomm and EE who have been successfully testing 4G LTE Advanced Category 9 which has reached jaw-dropping speeds of 410Mbps as reported in the article “Qualcomm hit 410Mbps in 4G Cat 9 trial”, published 22 December 2014 1:49 pm GMT, by Rich Trenholm, CNET News.

British Telecom Provider EE may have plans to upgrade to 4G LTE advanced soon and this test may be their way of advertising to Britons that they'll potentially have the fastest speeds around come January 2015, even faster than LTE-Advanced Category 4. It also gives Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 810 processor with integrated LTE-Advanced next-generation modem a good workout while testing out Huawei's 4G LTE-Advanced Category 9 Network.

The secret to Huawei’s 4G LTE-Advanced Category 9 Network speed boost? More bandwidth but this time using different frequencies of Spectrum from within a Telecom Providers allocated bands of Spectrum instead of all being within the same bands i.e. in this case:

1.      20MHz of EE's 1800MHz Spectrum band

2.      20MHz of EE's 2.6GHz Spectrum band

3.      15MHz of EE's 2.6GHz Spectrum band

This implies that the test phone or modem was a Quad-band modem e.g. 850MHz, 1800MHz, 1900MHz, 2.6GHz and was reprogrammed to instead use multiple frequencies from multiple bands instead of locking into the Frequency bands that Telecom Provider traditionally allocated for 3G and 4G services.

Huawei’s 4G LTE Advanced Test – 410MBps Download via inefficient Spectrum Aggregation

The implication is that Telecom Providers will therefore have to provision more Spectrum for 4G LTE Advanced in order to achieve these speeds. Apparently they can't compress more data into the individual bands, which would have been much more efficient use of Spectrum and a lot less taxing on a Telecom Provider just to allow a single user to stream a movie on their smartphone.

For some perspective, that's faster than FLOW Ultra which has a download sped of 100Mbps as stated in my blog article entitled “FLOW rolls out Hosted PBX - How 100 MBs FLOW Ultra can power a Private WiMaX Community Network” and that's DOCSIS 2.0 based Cable Broadband.

It may potentially be faster than current AT&T U-verse, Verizon Fios and Google Fiber Top speeds, which are yet to really make 1 Gbps speeds widely available to regular customer despite the ambitious rollout of 1 Gbps services across the US of A as reported in my blog article entitled “Gig.U Third Annual Report - Google Fiber's American Gigabit Internet Revolution as Jamaica starts Broadband Internet Revolution”.

That much speed, I suspect, is necessary, as with Telecom Providers, it’s all about the Next Big Thing that’ll attract customers and not necessarily what they plant to do with all that bandwidth.

But a more efficient way needs to be found, such as FLORA (Fiber-Less Optical Receiver Array) based on the research of EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) as detailed in my blog article entitled “EPSRC and University of Strathclyde researches FLORA based Li-Fi for developement in the next four years - Selena Gomez’s Come and Get It FLORA Li-Fi for Last Mile Internet to be Downloaded” to deliver faster Wireless Broadband speeds to modems and smartphones, as that's too much bandwidth allocated to as single device.

Huawei needs to take their cues from the Fiber Optic World, which uses Optical Frequencies to achieve higher bandwidths. This is preferable to forcing Telecom Providers to spend more money on acquiring Spectrum allocations for higher speeds that customers may not potently pay for and tie up Spectrum for 4G LTE Advanced services that they may not use all of the time for applications in need of such large bandwidths.