Telstra, Ericsson and Qualcomm reached a theoretical maximum uplink speed of 986 Mbps, the highest uplink peak rate ever recorded on a commercial network. The demonstration happened on Telstra’s 5G network in Queensland, Australia.
The trial used Ericsson’s New Radio-Dual Connectivity (NR-DC) technology, which allows mobile devices to use both mid-band and mmWave frequencies. And the trial also used Ericsson’s software with four-component carrier aggregation, in which four contiguous channels of 100 MHz are combined, resulting in higher data speeds.
The uplink peak rate was achieved by combining the data rates from four 100 MHz channels of Telstra’s millimeter wave spectrum combined with 100 MHz of 3.6 GHz mid-band spectrum.
A smartphone form-factor test device was powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System.
The test was conducted at Telstra’s 5G Innovation Center, using Telstra’s commercial network. It doubled Ericsson’s previous record for uplink speed conducted by Ericsson along with MediaTek in June.
RELATED: Ericsson, MediaTek notch 495 Mbps uplink with mmWave and carrier aggregation
Ericsson’s NR-DC software is now available for commercial deployment. And its four-component carrier aggregation software is slated to go commercial in the second quarter of 2022.
Ericsson isn’t the only vendor working on improved uplink speeds.
In October, Samsung worked with Verizon and Qualcomm on a lab trial, achieving 711 Mpbs upload speeds. The demonstration was conducted by combining 400 MHz of Verizon’s 5G mmWave frequency and 20 MHz of 4G frequency using 5G technologies such as mmWave carrier aggregation and Single-User MIMO.
RELATED: Verizon marks 711 Mbps upload speed in mmWave trial with Samsung, Qualcomm
When it comes to speed, uplink has been getting more attention, partly because it’s important for things like video conferencing.