While Category 6 LTE devices are just coming onto the market the first being the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Ericsson, Qualcomm and Telstra are now demonstrating category 9 speeds.
In the demonstration of LTE-A 20 MHz in each of three bands B28 (700MHz) B3 (1800MHz) and Band (2600MHz) were aggregated to achieve peak speeds of 450MHz. A Qualcomm equipped category 9 LTE-A modem was used and on the network side Ericsson’s suitably enhanced RBS6000 family base stations on Telstra’s 4GX network completed the connection.
In May 2014 Telstra as part of its Mobile Update gave its view of the speed steps with LTE advanced summarised as follows. Subsequently Telstra revised its date for introduction of category 9 in its network to April 2015 in capital city CBD’s.
| Standard | LTE | LTE-A | LTE-A 4GX | LTE-A 4GX | LTE-A 4GX |
| Timing | Now | Now | 2H 2014 | 2H 2014 | 1H 2015 |
| Device Category | 3 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 9 |
| Bandwidth | 15MHz | 20MHz | 40MHz | 40MHz | 60MHz |
| Bands | 1800MHz | 1800/900MHz | 1800/700MHz | 1800/700MHz | !800/700/2600MHz |
| Peak Speed Down | 100Mbps | 150Mbps | 150Mbps | 300Mbps | 450Mbps |
| Typical Speed Down | 2-50Mbps | 2-50Mbps | 2-75Mbps | 2-100Mbps | TBA |
The GSA has an updated report showing the adoption and peak speed of carrier aggregation capable networks world wide. They say that there are 49 operators in 24 countries with LTE CA. Their report is here.
Supporting these TLE Advanced speed steps on November 20 2014 Qualcomm announced their newest (5th) generation of Gobi modem chips the 9×45 family. This family of chips will be based on 20nm architecture and support LTE-A Category 10. They will support peak speeds of 450Mbps downlink and 100Mbps uplink on suitably upgraded LTE-A networks. These speeds are achieved by utilising 60MHz 3X carrier aggregation on the downlink and 40MHz 2X CA on the uplink. Category 10 devices have the same downlink as Category 9 but double the uplink speed.
Like previous families the 9×45 will be backward compatible with all older generations and Qualcomm say they will work on all major RF bands and combinations in both FDD and TDD LTE.
To make it truely future proof the device provides support for all four GPS constellations GPS (USA), Beidou (China), Glonass (Russia) and Galileo (EU) and for upcoming LTE Broadcast and Voice over LTE VoLTE. Qualcomm will include this modem family and hence capability into their latest system on a chip SoC Snapdragon 810.
The modem family has a companion RF360 Envelope Tracker. These devices are increasingly being used to vary voltage to power amplifiers in LTE devices to enable them to work at peak efficiency. The iPhone 6 and other newish devices employ envelope tracking.
The chips are sampling now and will be seen in commercial devices in 2015 according to Qualcomm. You can see the comparison of the Qualcom Snapdragon 800 series SoC’s here.