Verizon, SK Telecom and T-Mobile trial Ericsson License Assisted Access
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Verizon, SK Telecom and T-Mobile trial Ericsson License Assisted Access

Ericsson said today that Verizon, SK Telecom and T-Mobile US are trialling the Swedish vendor’s License Assisted Access (LAA) on their networks.

LAA is designed to improve indoor app coverage for smartphone users and Ericsson added the technology to its portfolio early last month.

Ericsson completed the milestone in cooperation with Qualcomm Technologies, and the technology is now live in Ericsson labs; supporting the aggregation of licensed and unlicensed spectrum for peak rates up to 450Mbps and enabling the fair divide of spectrum between mobile and Wifi devices.

“It is very encouraging to see LAA live in the Ericsson labs already delivering on the promises of both a better mobile broadband customer experience and the fair sharing and co-existence within the 5GHz band among wireless and Wifi devices,” said Neville Ray, CTO at T-Mobile.

“With over 500MHz of under-utilised spectrum in the 5GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) band, LAA can provide our customers with superior network performance while effectively co-existing with other Wifi devices to ensure a better experience for all wireless users.”

Ericsson will be demonstrating the technology at Mobile World Congress (MWC 2015) in Barcelona next month.

“Carrier Aggregation was an important technology trend for mobile networks in 2014 and LAA is already set to be a key focus for mobile operators in 2015,” said Thomas Noren, VP and head of radio product management at Ericsson.

“Innovations like LAA that improve the user experience while increasing spectrum efficiency will be significant milestones that mobile industry leaders must both drive and support.”

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