China’s Huawei Technologies has partnered with UK mobile operator EE – part of BT Group – in a successful live demonstration of 2.1Gbps mobile speeds using LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) carrier aggregation (CA) technology at the EE/Huawei UK test lab. BT/EE Managing Director of IT & Mobile, Fotis Karonis said in a press release that the focus of the ongoing partnership with Huawei is to ‘introduce Gigabit class networks to the UK’s cities’, whilst ‘at the same time our rollout of 4G continues into the most rural parts of the country for ubiquitous high speed mobile broadband in the UK.’
The release adds that EE is working with Huawei to deliver the ‘TechCity 2.0’ smart cities programme, which will include video optimisation and a specific video experience measurement score referred to as vMOS, along with enterprise and public safety applications of innovative push-to-talk (PTT) capabilities over LTE. The TechCity 1.0 programme focused on delivering ‘innovative technologies into the field and showing the benefits to end users’, while TechCity 2.0 adds ‘business model innovation, and social responsibility leadership’, and is dedicated to ‘enhancing business and livelihoods, as well as increasing connectivity between people, between people and machines, and between machines and machines, to improve the efficiency of entire societies,’ according to Huawei, which has deployed the TechCity programme in more than 20 cities around the world.