Vodacom announced today that it has achieved mobile speeds in excess of 1Gbps by aggregating both licensed and unlicensed bands for indoor coverage in its laboratory on 16 and 17 May 2016.
“Breaking 1Gbps represents an important milestone for LTE network speeds in South Africa as it shows what can be achieved by combining adequate spectrum with the latest technology. Lack of spectrum has become one of the biggest hurdles in deploying high-speed broadband services to consumers,” Andries Delport, Vodacom’s Chief Technology Officer, said.
“Vodacom believes that the trial demonstrates it is at the forefront of introducing cutting edge small cell technology to meet the strong demand of its customers for mobile data services in all its markets.”
Vodacom’s laboratory tests were concluded using the latest small cell technology and used a combination of feature enhancements to breach the 1Gbps milestone. For the test, Vodacom aggregated different spectrum bands including one carrier of its own licensed spectrum and two carriers of unlicensed ISM spectrum.
Earlier in the week, Vodacom demonstrated speeds exceeding 360Mbps using 2×2 MIMO and 64 QAM. By utilising more sophisticated antenna technology and modulation schemes, Vodacom was able to nearly triple these speeds to break the 1Gbps barrier.
