Nokia and SK Telecom have again demonstrated the unparalleled benefits of converging the TDD and FDD LTE spectrum. By aggregating 10 spectrum frequencies allocated for both LTE variants for a massive 200 MHz of bandwidth, Nokia and SK Telecom reached a throughput speed of 3.78 Gbps. At this speed, a mobile broadband user can download a full-length 5 GB high-definition (HD) movie in just 11 seconds.

The unmatched throughput was achieved with Nokia’s Single RAN solution including the high-capacity Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station, enhanced with software to aggregate carriers on both TDD and FDD LTE spectrum and to implement LTE-Advanced Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology. With this demonstration, Nokia and SK Telecom have pushed the boundaries of carrier aggregation by successfully achieving twice the amount of carriers and bandwidth specified by 3GPP, which foresees the aggregation of 5 carriers up to a total bandwidth of 100 MHz.

There are significant benefits for operators in all geographical regions in combining their TDD and FDD LTE spectrum resources, one being the increased capacity for downlink and uplink data-intensive applications such as video streaming – and also the ability to eliminate supplementary downlink (SDL) completely. Nokia has deployed a number of TDD-FDD networks and is working closely with 3GPP and several operators to make TDD-FDD convergent networks a commercial reality to match and exceed the expectations of the most demanding mobile users.