In an attempt to deliver more broadband services in a heavily spectrum-constrained environment, telecommunications giant MTN has teamed up with Ericsson to trial technology aggregating licensed and unlicensed spectrum.

The long-term evolution-unlicensed (LTE-U) trial, undertaken on Thursday at MTN’s flagship channel store in Morningside, aimed to establish the parameters of the mobile technology that was expected to bring about higher data speeds, increased network capacity and significantly enhanced customer experience.

The LTE-U trial aggregated 10 MHz of MTN’s licensed 1 800 MHz spectrum and 20 MHz within the unlicensed 5 GHz band, using indoor small cells, achieving throughput of 200 Mb/s, said MTN South Africa acting CTO Krishna Chetty.

While LTE-U, which was suitable for in-building LTE deployments, was designed to leverage the spectrum capacity available in the unlicensed 5 GHz band spectrum, it would not impact WiFi services, which shared the platform.

“This is the first LTE-U trial and first enhanced carrier sensing adaptive transmission functionality demonstrated in Africa. Through this, we demonstrated that LTE is a good neighbour to WiFi,” explained Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa mobile broadband head of practice Henrik Linnet.

At the start of last year, Ericsson introduced LTE-U, which had also been referred to as license-assisted access, on small cells, opening up the spectrum generally used for WiFi and Bluetooth technologies as the world progressed towards the fifth-generation network.

Over the past year, several live demonstrations were undertaken, including with Qualcomm Technologies, in China, and through the networks of Telefónica, in Spain, besides others.

It was found that the use of 4% or less of the 5 GHz band provided up to 150 Mb/s boost in current LTE data speeds.

MTN used a noncommercial prototype device to test LTE-U; however, LTE-U-enabled commercial devices were expected to be deployed into the market this year.