Often, the least hyped technologies are the most effective, get the widest adoption, and have the greatest impact. Carrier aggregation is one such technology that I don’t think it received its fair share of attention. LTE did bring a number of new features that were not available in 3G, such as MIMO. But MIMO was already deployed in… Read More »
News of LTE-Advanced is making headlines. SK Telecom aggregated two 10 MHz carriers in 800 and 1800 MHz to achieve 150 Mbps downlink throughput with a version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 handset built upon Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 SoC. Verizon announced that its LTE network is nearly complete and suggested carrier aggregation (CA) is the next step. AT&T… Read More »
Small cells raise a number of practical implementation questions which are yet to be resolved. One such question is whether small cells should operate in the same frequency band as the macrocell layer (co-channel deployment), or on a different frequency band. The question has profound implications to operators, vendors, and to regulators alike. To clarify, recall that in… Read More »
In my earlier blog post, The Hype & Reality of Small Cells Performance, I provided a qualitative review of small cell performance and discussed interference scenarios that limit performance. Perhaps the most defining problem of small cell deployments is the large transmit power imbalance between the macrocell and the small cell (~20-30 dB) which increases the potential of… Read More »