The Singaporean mobile operator M1, working in partnership with China’s Huawei Technologies, has successfully demonstrated download speeds in excess of 1Gbps and peak uploads of over 130Mbps in a LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) laboratory test. Huawei notes that LTE Cat 9 devices – the most advanced 4G devices available commercially at the moment – support download speeds of up to 450Mbps and upload speeds of up to 50Mbps; the latest trial was carried out on a prototype Cat 14 device, Xinhua news agency reports. The pair reported that the trial involved the integration of no fewer than four advanced mobile carrier technologies: tri-band carrier aggregation (3C), multiple-input multiple-output (4×4 MIMO), higher order modulation 256 (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, or QAM) and dual-band uplink carrier aggregation (CA).
M1 Chief Technical Officer Denis Seek commented: ‘Through technology innovation, we can further stretch the capability of current 4G technology, prior to the advent of 5G technology, to achieve an incredible peak download speed of more than 1Gbps,’ while Huawei’s President of LTE Networks, Wang Jun, noted: ‘The successful trial marks the beginning of the 4.5G era in Singapore, demonstrating Huawei and M1’s continual innovation in delivering the benefits of the latest mobile technology advances to Singapore consumers, for instance, in enabling machine-to-machine connections and improving HD video experience.’