US mobile giant Sprint and Finnish vendor Nokia have announced that the cellco’s deployment of three-channel carrier aggregation (CA) is now underway in Kansas City. As such, Sprint’s ‘LTE Plus’ network has been successfully demonstrated at Kauffman Stadium, achieving downlink transmission speeds of up to 230Mbps. The new platform utilises three separate 20MHz channels in the 2500MHz band, or 60MHz in total. The cellco claims to hold more than 160MHz of 2500MHz spectrum in the top 100 US markets. Sprint expects to have more than 100 ‘LTE Plus’ cell sites on air in the Kansas City metro area by the end of September. Running in parallel, Sprint has more than 500 cell sites operational in Chicago, the press release notes. Dr. John Saw, Sprint CTO, commented: ‘Kansas City is our hometown and it’s also one of the most tech savvy cities in the country, so it’s fitting that it would be one of our first markets to receive this advanced capability.’
Sprint began its rollout of two-channel CA in 2015 and currently delivers peak speeds of more than 100Mbps in 237 LTE Plus markets across the country using 40MHz of 2500MHz spectrum, as previously owned by its WiMAX subsidiary Clearwire. Sprint also uses 800MHz ex-iDEN spectrum and 1900MHz ex-CDMA spectrum to support its 4G networks.