GSA confirmed in a new information paper published this week that 20 operators have commercially launched 300 Mbps Category 6 LTE-Advanced service in 15 countries: Australia, Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. 3GPP defines a Category 6 system within its Release 10 specifications as having a theoretical peak downlink speed capability of 300 Mbps, and 50 Mbps on the uplink.
Meanwhile, nine Category 9 systems are in deployment, trial or test phase across Australia, Japan, Portugal, Qatar, Turkey, South Korea, Switzerland, UAE and the UK, added GSA. 3GPP defines a Category 9 system as part of Release 11, and is capable of a theoretical peak downlink speed of 450 Mbps, and 50 Mbps for the uplink direction.
The Global Association for GSM said that in addition, a total of 49 operators have commercially launched LTE-Advanced with theoretical peak downlink speeds between 110 Mbps and 300 Mbps in 31 countries.
Alan Hadden, President, GSA
A further 22 Category 6 LTE-Advanced systems are also being deployed or in a trial phase. It means that 42 operators in total are investing in 300 Mbps LTE-Advanced deployments in 24 countries.
