Singapore’s third largest operator M1 said it achieved a peak download speed of more than 1Gb/s in its LTE lab using commercial hardware equipment from Huawei and a prototype CAT14 device.

The trial, which the companies also said demonstrated peak upload speeds of more than 130Mb/s, combined three-component carrier aggregation (CA), 4×4 MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output), 256 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) and two-component uplink CA.

“We can further stretch the capability of current 4G technology, prior to the advent of 5G technology, to achieve an incredible peak download speed of more than 1Gb/s,” said M1 CTO Denis Seek.

Wang Jun, Huawei’s president of LTE networks, said the trial marks the beginning of the so-called ‘4.5G ‘era in Singapore. Huawei is on a major charm offensive around 4.5G, touting projects at China Mobile, HKT, SoftBank, TeliaSonera and Turkcell.