Indian telco Bharti Airtel, MediaTek and Nokia announced on Monday they have completed a trial that successfully combined TDD and FDD mid-band spectrum to boost 5G uplink speeds as high as 300 Mbps.
The trial, conducted at Airtel’s tech lab, aggregated frequency bands of 3.5 GHz and 2.1 GHz for the uplink and then used UL Tx switching technology to dynamically switch the uplink transmission across two carriers in TDD and FDD spectrum.
Nokia provided its 5G AirScale radio portfolio for the trial, while MediaTek provided its Dimensity 5G mobile platform as the user equipment.
Tarun Chhabra, country manager and head of Nokia’s Indian mobile networks business, said this UL Tx switching technique not only enables faster uplink speeds, but also makes the uplink more efficient and significantly improves performance for use cases such as video conferencing, live streaming and large file uploads.
“Uplink Tx switching will pave the way for superior 5G networks, enabling seamless data transfer in mobile devices and driving demand for data-intensive applications like XR [extended reality],” Chhabra said in a statement.
Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon said the technology will “greatly enhance our network's uplink performance, resulting in faster data speeds and improved connectivity.”
