Ericsson on Wednesday revealed new hardware and software upgrades it said will support gigabit LTE speeds.
According to the company, multiple innovations go into the making of 1 gbps capabilities.
First, the company the upgrades will allow for the bonding of 60 MHZ of spectrum to create a “robust” carrier aggregation service.
The carrier aggregation goes hand-in-hand, Ericsson said, with three new radio access products supporting a 4×4 multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) setup on mid and high radio bands and 2×2 MIMO on lower bands.
Ericsson said its setup combines the above with 256 Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) to pack more data packets into the radio transmission stream and Ericsson’s Lean Carrier technology to remove excess signaling in the network.
According to Ericsson’s Sebastian Tolstoy, gigabit LTE speeds present an “enormous value for operators and customers” and would provide an “extremely fast time to content for users.” The speeds, Ericsson said, would allow consumers to download an entire TV show season in just five seconds.
Ericsson said the technology will be available beginning in the second quarter of 2016.