STOCKHOLM -- While LTE coverage continues to be rolled out over the coming years, bringing with it more data capacity and higher speeds, operators still need to find ways to ensure a quality customer experience for mobile broadband. In order to help bridge that gap, Turkcell, Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, successfully demoed the world's first live 3-Carrier High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (3C-HSDPA) on a commercial network. The test utilized a feature that will be included in Ericsson's software release 15A and was conducted on a smartphone powered by a Qualcomm processor with its integrated Qualcomm modem.

Three-Carrier HSDPA is engineered to increase user speeds for downlink by up to 50 percent throughout the entire cell compared to single carrier, regardless of network load. The demo recorded 63 Mbps downlink.

The demonstration was performed in the 2.1GHz band in a WCDMA commercial network using three 5 MHz carriers for downlink and two 5MHz carriers for uplink, which were all within the 2.1GHz frequency band that is owned by Turkcell. The trial used core network and radio access network nodes supplied by Ericsson.

Turkcell, one of the leading mobile operators and one of the technology providers of the demonstration, currently has a Dual-Carrier HSDPA network supporting speeds of up to 43.2 Mbps in downlink, and has 5.76 Mbps in uplink.

Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC)