Swedish equipment vendor Ericsson and US chipmaker Qualcomm combined licensed and unlicensed LTE spectrum to deliver a theoretical peak throughput rate of 300Mb/s in a demo in Beijing.

At PT/Expo Comm China the two firms aggregated 20MHz of licensed LTE spectrum with 20MHz of unlicensed 5GHz airwaves, using an Ericsson indoor picocell base station and a device running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor.

LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) is an LTE-Advanced technology that can improve mobile data speeds and reduce congestion through a unified network, Ericsson said in a statement. LTE-U enables carrier aggregation of licensed spectrum with unlicensed bands to effectively address growth in indoor data traffic. Unlicensed spectrum is generally used for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections.

The two firms demonstrated licensed assisted access (LAA) LTE technology in February to achieve a downlink speed of up to 450Mb/s.

Ericsson first introduced its LTE-U small cells at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January.

South Korea’s third largest operator LG Uplus previously combined LTE-U with existing LTE spectrum to achieve a theoretical download speed of 600Mb/s. The operator used 60MHz in the 5.8GHz band, which traditionally is used for Wi-Fi, and 20MHz in an unconfirmed LTE band.