China Mobile, Ooredoo Qatar and Nokia Networks claim to have showcased a record-breaking download speed of 4.1Gb/s by combining 200MHz of TDD- and FDD-LTE spectrum using 10-band carrier aggregation.

The demo at the ITU Telecom World event in Qatar used Nokia’s Flexi Multi-radio 10 base station and LTE-A MIMO technology and also achieved an upload speed of more than 300Mb/s.

At this speed, users would be able to download a full-length 5GB high-definition (HD) movie in just 11 seconds and simultaneously upload a 5-minute 30 MB video clip from a concert in less than a second.

Huang Yuhong, deputy general Manager of China Mobile Research Institute and secretary general of the Global TD-LTE Initiative (GTI), said: “This milestone boosts our efforts as we drive the commercialisation and globalisation of TD-LTE and TDD-FDD converged technology across the globe.”

The demo, which was supported by the GTI, was slightly higher than the 3.78Gb/s download speed Nokia and SK Telecom achieved in June using TDD-FDD carrier aggregation with 200MHz over 10 bands.

Vendors and operators have claimed a number of TDD-FDD carrier aggregation firsts over the past few months.

A bit closer to commercial reality, in early October Ericsson, SingTel and Qualcomm showcased FDD-TDD carrier aggregation with a peak downlink speed of 260Mb/s using commercially available hardware and software. The demonstration on SingTel’s network, which aggregated 20MHz of FDD spectrum with 20MHz of TDD spectrum, used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor and Ericsson’s LTE software.

In early September China Telecom and Nokia said they demoed FDD-TDD carrier aggregation with a peak download speed of 260Mb/s using a commercial user chipset from Marvell. The speed was achieved using 20MHz of (paired) FDD spectrum in the 1.8GHz band and 20MHz of (unpaired) TDD bandwidth in the 2.6GHz frequency.