Vodafone Turkey and Huawei announced they have completed what they claim is the first verification of the GL spectrum sharing solution on Vodafone's commercial 900 MHz networks in the city of Diyarbakir in Turkey.
This solution, developed through a collaboration on spectrum sharing capabilities between Huawei Mobile Innovation Centre and Vodafone Networks CoE (Center of Excellence), enables spectrum sharing between GSM and LTE with a high degree of overlap between the two technologies. The technology improves both LTE data rate and cell capacity available in the 900 MHz spectrum allocation from Vodafone Turkey.
Huawei claims that compared to LTE 5 MHz performance, the GL technology enables average user data throughput to be increased by nearly 58% on the downlink and 44% on the uplink.
Vodafone Turkey launched its 4.5G network for commercial use in April 2016 and claims to offer the largest 4.5G coverage in Turkey, currently serving over 8 million LTE customers. Subsequently, as more users migrate to LTE the effective allocation of spectrum resources to support increasing LTE data traffic has become a priority for Vodafone Turkey. The GL spectrum sharing solution features Huawei's proprietary algorithms, which are designed to free operators from the restrictions of standard LTE bandwidth.
The Huawei solution ensures that scattered spectrum resources are utilised more effectively to enable higher data rates and an enhanced user experience. By providing more flexibility in terms of the resource block allocation and spectrum allocation effectively used by LTE the GL technology also maintains sufficient GSM channels to carry 2G CS traffic.
In February, Huawei, Vodafone and Qualcomm Technologies announced they had jointly created in Turkey what they claimed was the first network ready to use Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA) technology, based on the 3GPP R13 standard. LAA is designed to help improve the user experience by enabling faster download speeds.The LAA-ready network was tested using a Huawei Lampsite base station in a Vodafone Turkey store in Istanbul and used 40 MHz of unlicensed spectrum in 5 GHz and 15 MHz licensed spectrum in 2.6 GHz for three carrier aggregation. The on-site peak download speed of 370 Mbit/s was achieved using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with X16 LTE mobile test device
- In 2016, Huawei announced that its Active Antenna Unit (AAU) solution was supporting Turkey's deployment of 4.5G networks to enable enhanced mobile broadband (MBB) services. Turkey launched its large-scale plan for the evolution from 3G to 4.5G networks in 2015 and released the first 4.5G spectrum license in August of that year.
