Using the latest mobile broadband technology, Vodacom has achieved real-world mobile broadband speeds of in excess of 170Mbit/s.
The speeds were achieved in Llandudno, near Cape Town, but the operator has warned that users in the rest of the country shouldn’t expected such speeds until it has been granted access to additional radio frequency spectrum.
Vodacom has achieved the speeds by activating what it calls a “three-band, carrier-aggregated” network. It achieved the speeds using a Samsung Galaxy S7.
“On Wednesday, 16 March, at Llandudno, Cape Town, Vodacom activated the first commercial LTE-Advanced (4G+) site in South Africa that combines or ‘carrier aggregates’ three different frequency bands into a single band with real-world speeds exceeding 170Mbit/s,” it said.
“This was done with the new Samsung Galaxy S7 that natively supports this configuration.”
For the more technically inclined, Vodacom used 25MHz of spectrum in total — 10MHz at 1,8GHz, 10MHz at 2,1GHz and 5MHz at 900MHz.
“Llandudno is geographically very unique — an isolated bay area with little to no line of sight to other populated areas of the Cape Peninsula,” Vodacom explained.
“There are also steep hills and mountains separating it from neighbouring sites in areas such as Hout Bay and Camps Bay. This presents a unique opportunity to ‘re-farm’ a lot of spectrum for LTE without needing to do so in neighbouring areas and — yet again — shows what is possible today with existing technology if enough spectrum is available.”
However, Vodacom said it is “extremely difficult to replicate these results in other areas as spectrum re-farming is not possible without affecting service quality to existing users”. — © 2016 NewsCentral Media