Higher Mobile Bandwidths Often Will Require Channel Bonding

Lots of recent demonstrations of mobile bandwidth reaching hundreds of megabits or higher all rely on use of very wide channels, or channel bonding. That is not a new approach.

Legacy fixed network T-carrier services relied on channel bonding or pair bonding to boost bandwidth as well.

China Mobile and Nokia demonstrated 220 Mbps peak transmission rates over a TD-LTE network using carrier aggregation across different LTE frequency bands.

The trial used the 3.5-GHz spectrum, where perhaps 400 MHz of spectrum is available for use.

China Mobile has demonstrated Long Term Evolution-Advanced access aggregating three carriers with ZTE and Qualcomm.

The network showed peak downlink rates of over 300 Mbps.

China Mobile and Qualcomm recently collaborated with Huawei to complete the first verification of TD-LTE inter-band three carrier aggregation. The new trial builds on this collaboration.

LTE-A is expected to help 4G network evolve to support 1Gbps downlink rates and 500 Mbps uplink speeds, serving as a crucial stepping stone towards the 5G era.