Together with Nokia, Sprint has conducted a live demonstration of its new three channel carrier aggregation at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, right before the start of the Major League Baseball (MLB) match between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees. The test resulted in peak connection speeds of up to 230 mbps inside the sports arena, with the use of devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, LG’s G5, and HTC’s 10 flagship smartphone.
For those not familiar with the concept of multi-channel carrier aggregation, it involves combining bands of spectrum together in order to build channels that deliver a more expanded capacity, capable of supporting significantly faster connection speeds on compatible mobile handsets. Think of it as improving a highway of data by adding extra lanes in order to minimize traffic congestion, thereby allowing more amounts of data to pass through at enhanced speeds.
Last year, Sprint started deploying two channel carrier aggregation, which can now achieve peak speeds of over a hundred mbps in more than 230 LTE Plus markets across the United States using 40 MegaHertz of 2.5 GigaHertz spectrum on Sprint’s LTE Plus cellular sites. For its three channel carrier aggregation, however, Sprint is planning to make full use of 60 MegaHertz of spectrum in the 2.5 GigaHertz band in order to deliver top download speeds of over 200 mbps on capable handsets. Currently in the top 100 markets in the country, Sprint holds over 160 MegaHertz of 2.5 GigaHertz spectrum. In order to further boost coverage and ensure network reliability across its LTE Plus network, the wireless carrier is also taking advantage of the 800 MegaHertz and the 1.9 GigaHertz spectrum.
With Sprint’s latest roll out, the Kansas City metropolitan area becomes just the second market to get three channel carrier aggregation. Of course, the wireless carrier is planning a more expansive deployment later on, targeting to deploy countrywide in the next six months. But in the greater Kansas City area, the mobile operator is looking to kick things off with a hundred cellular sites fully functioning before the start of October this year.
American mobile users are consuming mobile data more than ever. According to information from the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), 9.6 trillion megabytes of mobile data were consumed in the US last year. That volume is easily triple the quantity consumed in 2013 and double the amount compared to 2014.
