BARCELONA–Vendors at Mobile World Congress this week vied with one another over who had the largest capacity, adopting ever-more bizarre carrier-stacking and multi-antenna schemes all in the name of producing the biggest fattest single broadband wireless connection.
Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) won the prize for the most ridiculously outsized transmission, though it had to perform some considerable network tinkering to pull it off. It managed to cram 1 Gb/s of capacity into a single link, stacking four 20 MHz long-term evolution distributed over 4 antennas at the transmitter and 4 antennas at the receiver. Considering few operators own more than 20 MHz of 4G spectrum, much less a total of 80 MHz, such a configuration as fairly unlikely in any real network any time soon. But you can’t blame Ericsson for going for the glory.
Meanwhile, Huawei looked toward technologies further off in the future, demoing its prototype version of the next-generation of wireless radio, LTE-Advanced. Huawei said it has achieved 600 Mb/s using multiple carriers and multiple antennas, though it failed to mention how many and what size of channels it was stacking or what antenna configurations it used.
Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI) speed demo was considerably slower, but also more realistic. It achieved 112 Mb/s over an high-speed packet access network. NSN combined four HSPA+ carriers, which usually support up 21 to 28 Mb/s over a 5 MHz, to achieve that feat. According to NSN, its four-carrier HSPA technology will be commercially available next year.
Though it didn’t demo the technology at the show, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) announced a speed milestone in China, where it achieved 80 Mb/s over a 20 MHz Time division-LTE carrier, using the new trial network it has built for China Mobile in Shanghai for the 2010 World Expo.
Ericsson even touted a 2.5 Gb/s connection at the show, though it was a millimeter wave backhaul radio transmission, not a radio access network link.