It has been a big week for carrier aggregation. On Monday, Sprint discussed how three-channel carrier aggregation is active on 500 Chicago-area cell sites, followed by Verizon Wireless announcing that two- and three-channel carrier aggregation is available in 461 markets.
Now, Sprint is showing off the technology in its home market of Kansas City, Kansas, with a promise to deploy upgraded technology, based on the LTE-Advanced standard, to some 100 cell sites in the city.
On Wednesday Sprint and Nokia achieved a peak data rate of 230 megabits per second during a demo inside Kauffman Stadium prior to the big-league baseball game between the hometown Royals and New York Yankees.
Sprint started rolling out two-channel carrier aggregation last year in 237 markets using 40 megahertz of spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band; three-channel carrier aggregation uses 60 megahertz of spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band. Sprint’s spectrum portfolio includes more than 160 megahertz in the 2.5 GHz band, along with holdings in the 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz bands.
“Kansas City is our hometown and it’s also one of the most tech-savvy cities in the country, so it’s fitting that it would be one of our first markets to receive this advanced capability,” said Sprint CTO John Saw. “4K streaming and powerful virtual reality systems are on the rise and we’re excited to take our LTE-Plus network to the next level increasing our speed and capacity 50% more with three-channel carrier aggregation.”
