Ooredoo Qatar is preparing to commercially launch 4.5G LTE-Advanced Pro (LTE-A Pro) services for compatible devices in early 2017 in partnership with Finnish technology vendor Nokia, a press release disclosed. At Ooredoo’s headquarters in Doha, Nokia and Ooredoo have achieved speeds of up to 1Gbps in a demonstration application of LTE-A Pro technology using three-carrier aggregation (3C), 256 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and 4×4 Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO) with Nokia’s ‘5G-ready’ AirScale radio platform. The release highlighted that the planned commercial launch in 1Q17 will offer 1Gbps (theoretical maximum) speed capabilities on category 16 (CAT 16) enabled devices. Earlier this year, Ooredoo introduced peak speed capabilities of ‘close to 500Mbps’ for CAT 11 device users via 3C and 256 QAM technologies.
CommsUpdate reported in mid-November that Ooredoo Qatar’s sole rival operator Vodafone is aiming to deploy 4.5G LTE-A Pro technology across its network ‘in the next few months’ in partnership with China’s Huawei.