TeliaSonera said Netcom, its Norwegian unit and a 4G pioneer, reached “world record” download speeds of up to 1Gb/s in Oslo, using technology dubbed as 4.5G and officially known as LTE Advanced Pro.

4.5G has been heavily promoted by Huawei and the Chinese vendor provided the infrastructure for TeliaSonera’s outdoor pilot. The technology has been claimed to bridge the gap between 4G and 5G and standards body 3GPP officially approved it in October, giving it the moniker LTE Advanced Pro (read more on the move here).

Huawei has already announced 4.5G trials with China Mobile, Japan’s SoftBank and Hong Kong’s HKT. It claims 4.5G will reduce latency from the current level of about 40ms to 10ms and provide the peak speeds of 1Gb/s as touted in today’s TeliaSonera announcement.

“This is an important milestone towards next year’s expected commercial availability of 4.5G,” noted Huawei in a joint statement with TeliaSonera. “With the introduction of 4.5G technology, operators will be able to improve the user experience and support the increase of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as new mobile Internet applications, such as VR glasses and drone technology.”

A TeliaSonera statement added: “NetCom is the first operator in the world to take the LTE Advanced Pro technology out of the test laboratory and build a pilot outdoors under real life conditions. To achieve the high speed, NetCom transmitted data over four frequency bands simultaneously, and what makes today’s test special is that NetCom only used frequency resources that are already available for mobile today: 800MHz, 1800MHz, 2100MHz and 2600MHz.”

Netcom’s 4G and 4G+ currently offer speeds of up to 80 Mb/s and 300 Mb/s, respectively. It was the world’s first operator to introduce 4G six years ago today.

TeliaSonera Norway’s CTO, Jon Christian Hillestad, said: “We do not know exactly which speeds the future will require, but the future will require bandwidth, high speed and no delay in transfers. We are preparing for that reality with LTE Advanced Pro,” he added.

The statement from the operator called the deployment “an important step towards 5G.”