Ericsson will support License Assisted Access (LAA) capability in its small cells starting in fourth quarter 2015. This will enable carrier aggregation of licensed with unlicensed bands to effectively address growth in indoor data traffic. T-Mobile US has agreed to trial the technology. LAA capability will be supported in the Ericsson Radio Dot System for medium and large buildings and the Ericsson RBS 6402 Indoor Picocell for smaller buildings under 50,000 square feet.
LAA is an LTE-Advanced technology that can improve mobile data speeds and reduce congestion. Ericsson calculates that using only 4 percent of the 5 GHz band, LAA can provide up to a 150 Mbps speed increase to smartphone users. Each additional 4 percent of available spectrum used will increase the smartphone data speed further. Ericsson LAA also incorporates fair sharing within the 5 GHz band, to accommodate traditional Wi-Fi users. Fair sharing works on the principle that Wi-Fi and LAA users would have equal access to the spectrum.
“One of the great things about LAA is its ‘rising tide’ effect, increasing system capacity and making way for better service to all users in the area, whether they have an LAA-enabled device, or are using Wi-Fi or cellular access,” stated Thomas Norén, Vice President, Head of Radio Product Management, Ericsson.
“With our LTE footprint now covering 264 million Americans, we look to innovations like License Assisted Access to help us drive an even better, more differentiated wireless experience. There’s approximately 550 MHz of underutilized spectrum in the 5 GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) band and LAA is one of the technologies we plan to develop and use in our continuing efforts to provide our customers with superior network performance. We are excited to be working with major infrastructure partners, like Ericsson, to bring this technology to our customers in the near-future,” said Neville Ray, Chief Technical Officer, T-Mobile US.
