Ericsson announced two trials using advanced LTE technology this week, showing the potential for operators’ existing networks in supporting the IoT and delivering higher speeds.
One test saw Ericsson successfully demonstrate 1.2GBps speeds on COSMOTE’s LTE network in Greece.
The trial used Ericsson radio solutions to aggregate 60MHz of spectrum from three carriers with 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM, with the download speed delivered to a Cobham Aerofle TM500 mobile device.
Ericsson said the use of 4×4 MIMO doubled peak rates with no additional spectrum required.
Completed on 29 December 2016, the other test completed an end-to-end data call using Cat-M1 technology on China Unicom’s live network in Beijing.
The trial used Qualcomm’s LTE modem communicating live on Ericsson’s mobile broadband network.
This test saw data transmitted via Cat-M1, also referred to as LTE-M, which is a technology for low power and wide area applications that was standardised in 3GPP Release 13 and uses the LTE network to communicate.
The technology will allow simple devices to communicate at long distances with low battery consumption.
Yun Hu, Director of IoT Technology and Development Center at China Unicom Network Technology Research Institute, said that China Unicom was looking for more industry partners to build IoT applications in its lab.
Meanwhile, Telefónica, Huawei and Kamstrup teamed up to trial NB-IoT in Chile. The three companies helped a water utility company to test a telemetry solution using real consumer data.
The operator reused the 700 MHz band on its LTE network for the trial.