VANCOUVER – Telus hit wireless speeds of nearly 1 Gbps in its downtown Vancouver 5G Living Lab last week, the company announced Wednesday.
Telus said that it successfully completed the first test of Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) on indoor and outdoor live networks in Canada, delivering download speeds of 970 Mbps indoors and 966 Mbps outdoors using 80 MHz of aggregated spectrum in a live, dynamic production network.
LAA is one of the key LTE Advanced Pro technologies that will enhance the Telus network as it continues to evolve toward next-generation 5G speeds. The technology works by combining licensed wireless spectrum with unlicensed spectrum that is publicly accessible. The result for the consumer is higher throughput and a better overall network experience.
Telus added that customers will be able to realize the speed benefits of LAA later this year, and that LAA deployments will continue through 2017 and into 2018 in various locations across Canada that have high volumes of pedestrian traffic, including hotels, office buildings, arenas and public outdoor sites.
"As the first carrier in Canada to successfully deploy LAA, we're able to combine licensed and unlicensed spectrum to offer our customers with even faster speeds and more capacity," said Telus' chief technology officer Ibrahim Gedeon, in the news release. "As we work with industry partners and regulatory bodies to enable new spectrum for the benefit of Canadians, our award-winning network will continue to get faster and faster as we lay the foundation for our next-generation 5G networks."
