Qualcomm Technologies alongside EE and Huawei have just announced that their collaboration has resulted in a successful outing where inter-company interoperability testing of LTE Category 9 connectivity is concerned, achieving a 3-carrier downlink aggregation and download speeds of up to 410 Mbps – of course, one ought to take note that such figures, and subsequent ones, were provided and most probably achieved under optimal conditions; which means that real life performance would, in all probability, be more subdued.
All testing was conducted with QTI’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor that sports an integrated LTE-Advanced next-generation modem, alongside Huawei’s commercial infrastructure solution, across EE’s LTE-A ‘4G+’ network. Category 9 Carrier Aggregation would enable EE to aggregate 20MHz of 1800MHz spectrum with another 20MHz of 2.6GHz, where there is also a third carrier of 15MHz of 2.6GHz.
Enrico Salvatori, senior vice president & president of Qualcomm Europe, shared, “We are excited to work with EE and Huawei in ushering in the latest evolution of wireless connectivity. Transitioning from Category 6 to Category 9 LTE-A connectivity will mean 1.5x faster peak download speeds, swift application response times, reliable connectivity and connections to the fastest networks.”
We do wonder how the battery life of devices that run on this setup will be like, and when will we see such service being made available to the masses? We are a data hungry people, after all.