Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Swedish M2M specialist being acquired by Sierra Wireless; BT takes its fiber to the basement; and Dutch FTTH operator reaches 2 million homes.

December 22, 2014

2 Min Read
Eurobites: EE Shows Off 3-Carrier Aggregation

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Swedish M2M specialist being acquired by Sierra Wireless; BT takes its fiber to the basement; and Dutch FTTH operator reaches 2 million homes.

  • EE , the UK mobile operator that's the focus of BT's mobile acquisition ambitions, has been testing LTE-Advanced technology that can deliver more than 400Mbit/s downstream mobile broadband connections. Working with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and the Technologies subsidiary of Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM), the operator has completed a trial of three-carrier aggregation capabilities, which combines the capacity of three different wireless connections to create one super-fast broadband connection. EE says its tests, which used Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 processor and Huawei's LTE-Advanced radio access network platform, involves the aggregation of 20MHz of 1800MHz spectrum with 20MHz of 2.6GHz spectrum and a further 15MHz of 2.6GHz capacity. The testing and introduction of enhanced 4G capabilities is part of EE's network and services roadmap that will help it migrate to a 5G world, as principal network architect Andy Sutton explained in a recent Light Reading video documentary. (See EE: The Road to 5G.)

    • Swedish machine-to-machine (M2M) platform and services specialist Wireless Maingate AB is being acquired by Sierra Wireless Inc. (Nasdaq: SWIR; Toronto: SW) for $90 million. (See Sierra Wireless to Buy M2M Specialist for $90M.)

    • BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) is running a pilot of fiber-to-the-basement services in the City of London (the capital's financial district) to deliver broadband access speeds of up to 80 Mbit/s to small and medium-sized businesses in dense urban areas where there is no room to deploy street cabinets for the operator's regular FTTC service. See this press release for more details.

    • Dutch broadband service provider Reggefiber BV , part of the KPN Telecom NV (NYSE: KPN) empire, has now connected 2 million homes, a quarter of buildings in the Netherlands, with fiber. For more details, see this announcement (in Dutch). (See KPN Buys Remaining 40% of Reggefiber and KPN Focuses on FTTH.)

      — Ray Le Maistre, Circle me on Google+ Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

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