T-Mobile and Ericsson have achieved speeds of 1.1 Gbps using 12-layer Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology, companies announced today.

This LAA technology builds upon operator’s deployments of 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM and will give its customers even greater access to near gigabit speeds in 2018, said Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer for T-Mobile.

The demo took place at T-Mobile's Bellevue, Washington lab using Ericsson Radio System and the TM500 network test equipment from Cobham Wireless. The data speeds were achieved by combining several key LTE technologies including 256 QAM, 4x4 MIMO, and LAA by aggregating two licensed carriers and three unlicensed carriers.

The use of these LTE technologies on unlicensed spectrum complements licensed spectrum and makes it possible for a larger number of operators to reach gigabit speeds in their networks.The Ericsson Radio 2205 gives operators the opportunity to deploy LTE on the 5GHz unlicensed band in outdoor micro cell environments. Using LAA, the unlicensed carriers on these radios can be aggregated with licensed carriers on the micro cells or on nearby macro cells.