At Qualcomm's booth among a number of other Snapdragon 800 (the newly-announced SoC formerly or also known as MSM8974) demos was one that caught my attention. Qualcomm setup a 20 MHz LTE test network on Band 4 (AWS) using Ericsson test equipment to demonstrate full UE Category 4 throughput on a development board with the SoC inside. This is the same IP block that is inside MDM9x25 which we talked about earlier, that is capable of LTE-Advanced with carrier aggregation, Category 4, and other features.

I saw throughput of just north of 140 Mbps on the demo, which was streaming three videos over the test network setup exclusively for the demo and also loading through webpages. 

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  • ssddaydream - Friday, January 11, 2013 - link

    I would think that very limited markets will actually have 20 Mhz of spectrum available. Often times I get less than 2-3 Mbps on LTE on Verizon in some areas during the daytime. Even if that much spectrum was available, what about the backhaul? 150Mbps seems like a very rare case, is it really worth it?
  • supert0nes - Saturday, January 12, 2013 - link

    Clearwire TDD - 40MHz+ wide channels possible.

    Verizon AWS Thanks to the cable companies they have 20x20MHz AWS in like all markets.
    T-Mobile with MetroPCS will have 10x10MHz + 5x5 AWS MHz in most markets. In some markets They have 20x20 as well.
  • Doormat - Saturday, January 12, 2013 - link

    That is probably a lightly loaded cell so one user getting 150Mbps isn't likely (when was the last time you got 50Mbps+ on LTE?). User speeds are likely to double your speeds now - so 10-20Mbps.

    The important thing with this is carrier aggregation, both intra-band and inter-band for max user speeds. It givens companies an incentive to use all the spectrum they own so they can be the "fastest" carrier in America.
  • Brian Klug - Saturday, January 12, 2013 - link

    The idea is, as I pointed out in the Transceiver/Modem piece - http://www.anandtech.com/show/6541/the-state-of-qu... to do carrier aggregation of two 10 MHz LTE carriers and get to an equivalent 20 MHz carrier.

    That's essentially AT&T's plan, and a few other operators in the USA (eg their 700 MHz band 13 or 17 + band 4) 10+10 FDD.

    -Brian
  • Sabresiberian - Saturday, January 12, 2013 - link

    Unless they actually meant "miilibits per second", heh.

    I tend not to correct a layman using the wrong symbol, but these guys are supposed to know what they are doing, and using the wrong symbol just isn't right. How are our young people supposed to grow up literate when the engineers pull crap like this?

    Great tech, good to see it in progress, but I have to be honest, I get a little skeptical about the quality of the work when I see mistakes like this.

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