Singtel and Ericsson announced they achieved theoretical peak speeds of 1.5Gb/s in a lab environment using five-carrier aggregation (5CA).

In a statement, Ericsson said the speed is 50 per cent faster than the 1Gb/s rate the two companies announced in February. Singtel said it will gradually deliver the increased rate across the island as more spectrum bands are allocated for LTE networks.

The trial combined two 1.8GHz bands with 2.1GHz, 2.6GHz and TD 2.5GHz spectrum, and used 256QAM and 4X4 MIMO technologies. The companies said they will deploy a pilot 5G network in Singapore in Q4.

Martin Wiktorin, head of Ericsson Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines, said by leveraging 5CA across both FDD and TD bands “we continue to lead the way to meet customers’ speed and capacity demands”.

The trial in February used the vendor’s quad-band FDD/TD carrier aggregation technology.

Smartphones capable of achieving 1.5Gb/s speeds are scheduled to be launched in 2019.

Rival StarHub claimed to have turned on the city state’s first commercial gigabit LTE network in April. The operator said network upgrades increased peak speeds from 400Mb/s to 1Gb/s on compatible phones. The upgrades followed StarHub’s purchase of additional 4G spectrum in the 700MHz, 900MHz and 2.5GHz bands in 2017.