EE Launches First 300 Mbps LTE Service Using Carrier Aggregation

EE has launched a 300Mbps 4G in the Tech City neighbourhood of London -- the fastest, commercial service delivered over a mobile network to date.

EE service has a theoretical maximum downlink speed of 300Mbps that is enabled by carrier aggregation.  EE is combining 20MHz of 1800MHz spectrum and 20MHz of 2.6GHz spectrum using an LTE-Advanced architecture.  On the customer side, there is a CAT6 Huawei router with 802.11ac Wi-fi.  The device can provide a high speed mobile Wi-Fi connection to up to twenty devices, and devices enabled with 802.11ac can access speeds as high as 200Mbps.

EE expects that the the first commercially available Mobile Wi-Fi units will be introduced by summer 2014, also by Huawei, with handsets to follow in the second half of the year.

EE CEO Olaf Swantee showcased the launch at the Huawei Global Mobile Broadband Forum in London. Huawei is EE's 4G technology partner for this world-leading mobile innovation.

"Today we are introducing the next age of 4G mobile technology to the UK. Our existing 4G network delivers incredible mobile data speeds and covers millions of people across the country, but we never stand still. We know that mobile data usage is going to keep increasing, and rapidly so," stated Swantee.

"The network we're switching on today in Tech City uses the spectrum that we acquired in the Ofcom spectrum auction earlier this year, and is the first part of an infrastructure that can meet the future demands of an increasingly data-hungry nation, enabling us to stay one-step ahead of the demand."

The company noted that the BBC iPlayer streams at 5Mbps, whereas 4K TV will stream at 20Mbps, implying that applications will emerge to take advantage of LTE-A capabilities.

EE also said that it now has over 1.2 million 4G customers and a 4G network that covers 131 towns and cities - approximately 60% of the population. The network was launched one year ago.

http://www.ee.co.uk
http://www.huawei.com