Carrier aggregation to grow in importance, 4G Americas says

Carrier aggregation (CA), in which carriers combine spectrum to create larger “virtual” bandwidths for LTE, will grow in importance, 4G Americas said in a white paper the group released Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1raszpz). CA, a key feature of LTE-Advanced, allows bandwidths of up to 100 MHz, the group said. “Basically all of an operator’s frequency allocations can be used to provide LTE services.” CA offers spectrum efficiency and peak rates “nearly on par with single wideband allocation,” the group said. The paper cited CA deployments in Australia, South Korea, the U.K. and elsewhere. In the U.S., AT&T plans the use of CA capability in Chicago and other markets to aggregate 2.1 GHz and 700 MHz spectrum, 4G Americas said. “Sprint plans to use CA as part of the Sprint Spark service to combine LTE spectrum across the 800 MHz, 1900 MHz and 2.5 GHz spectrum. T-Mobile & Verizon plan to use carrier aggregation to further enhance their AWS spectrum holdings.”