Nokia Networks and Qualcomm said they have completed interoperability testing of LTE-Advanced three-band carrier aggregation (CA), which enables peak data rates of 300Mb/s using 40MHz over three frequencies.

Using Nokia’s Flexi Multi-radio 10 base station, the tests were conducted last month at a Nokia lab in Germany on 3GPP bands 1, 3 and 5 and verified that three-band CA works with user devices based on the Snapdragon 810 processor.

The results show that three-band CA can be a viable alternative way to reaching 40MHz CA, which requires at least two bands of 20MHz each, Nokia said in a statement. The company added that it will be key for enabling higher data rates for LTE operators facing fragmented spectrum environments. It claims the technique boosts LTE-A data rates by up to 33 per cent.

Although LTE-A CA is standardised within 3GPP, interoperability testing is vital to prove the functionality works using each vendor’s software.

Nokia said it plans to use three-band CA in commercial networks later this year. The Snapdragon 810 processor is expected to be available in commercial devices by the first half of next year.

In early October Ericsson, SingTel and Qualcomm demoed FDD-TDD CA with a peak downlink speed of 260Mb/s using commercially available hardware and software. The demonstration on SingTel’s network aggregated 20MHz of FDD spectrum with 20MHz of TDD spectrum.

A month earlier China Telecom and Nokia Networks said they demoed FDD-TDD CA 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. The FDD spectrum contributed 150Mb/s to the total speed while TDD spectrum contributed 110Mb/s.