Following an announcement earlier this year that T-Mobile had started testing LTE Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) on its network, T-Mo has now come out with some details on its latest LAA lab demo.

T-Mobile recently teamed up with Ericsson to perform LAA tests in T-Mo’s lab in Bellevue, Wash. Using 12-layer LAA technology, T-Mobile and Ericsson recorded speeds of 1.1Gbps, making them the first to achieve speeds above 1Gbps on unlicensed spectrum.

In addition to the LAA technology, this demo utilized 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM by aggregating two licensed carriers and three unlicensed carriers.

Previous testing that took place using 10-layer LAA tech reached download speeds of 1Gbps. Moving up to 12-layer LAA allowed T-Mobile and Ericsson to surpass that 1Gbps threshold.

Here’s what T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray had to say about this LAA demo:

“T-Mobile has built the nation’s fastest LTE network by innovating and bringing new technologies to market for our customers. This LAA technology builds upon our deployments of 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM and will give customers even greater access to near gigabit speeds in 2018.”

T-Mobile also notes that Ericsson’s Radio 2205 lets carriers deploy LTE on the 5GHz unlicensed band in outdoor micro cells and that using LAA, the unlicensed carriers on these radios can be aggregated with licensed carriers on the micro cells or nearby macro cells.

T-Mo said last month that it plans to begin deploying LAA on small cells this year. There’s still no word on when or where that’ll happen, but T-Mobile’s continued testing of LAA is encouraging, especially when Neville Ray talks about using LAA, 4×4 MIMO, and 256 QAM to spread near gigabit speeds to more customers.

Source: T-Mobile