South Korea-based Samsung developed an LTE modem for its next-generation mobile processor featuring six-carrier aggregation (6CA), which supports a maximum downlink speed of 1.2Gb/s.

The smartphone giant said in a statement the Cat 18 modem is the first mobile processor to feature 6CA. Earlier this year, the company launched its Exynos 9 Series (8895) SoC featuring its Cat 16 LTE modem using 5CA, which achieved a peak downlink speed of 1Gb/s.

Samsung’s new LTE modem is expected to be in mass production by the end of this year.

Carrier aggregation combines a number of different carriers with various bandwidths to improve data transfer rates and network performance.

The modem supports 4×4 MIMO and higher-order 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) scheme to maximise the data transfer rate.