3 Hong Kong, the second largest mobile operator in the territory, plans to deploy five-component carrier aggregation (5CA) in its LTE-Advanced network this month after completing the refarming of spectrum in the 2.1GHz band.

The operator, which is working with Huawei to deploy the aggregation technology, said the use of 5CA will coincide with the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+, the first smartphones to support five carrier bands. Its LTE service will run on the 900MHz, 1.8GHz, 2.1GHz, 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz bands.

Cliff Woo Chiu-man, executive director and CEO of Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong Holdings (3 Hong Kong’s parent company), said: “Following completion of an NB-IoT network extending throughout Hong Kong last quarter, we activated all bands of spectrum to provide 4.5G service this quarter, coupled with soon-to-be-activated five-component CA technology – all to maximise spectrum efficiency.”

In June 2017 SK Telecom, the largest mobile player in South Korea, deployed five-band CA and 4×4 MIMO on its LTE-Advanced Pro network to deliver peak download speeds of 700Mb/s in 53 cities.

Singtel, Singapore’s leading mobile operator, in February announced it achieved a peak download speed of 1Gb/s in a trial using Sweden-based Ericsson’s quad-band FDD/TD CA technology.