Aeroflex Limited announced that the TM500 family of network and infrastructure test systems now supports the aggregation of component carriers (CC) of both types of LTE-A radio access—TDD and FDD.
4G mobile operators can address customer demand for higher data rates by using carrier aggregation of TDD and FDD bands to combine spectrum allocated to the different radio access technologies. Mixed-mode TDD and FDD carrier aggregation gives network operators more flexibility by using frequency allocations in both TDD and FDD bands to maximize 4G data speeds.
The TM500 is the industry-standard base station tester in use by infrastructure vendors across the world, and the E500—part of the TM500 family—is used by leading network operators to verify the performance of new network features.
“Since introducing carrier aggregation testing for our TM500 infrastructure customers in early 2012, we have been providing them with the tools to develop and test LTE-A carrier aggregation to the latest specifications as soon as these have been released,” said Shusina Ngwa, product manager at Aeroflex. “They can already test aggregation of two or three component carriers of the same radio access technology. Now for the first time they can do this with mixed-mode component carriers. It is crucial to be able to offer this capability at an early stage. This enables TDD/FDD network performance to be tested and validated ahead of the availability of the relevant end-user terminals and handsets.”
Aeroflex provides the tools for leading network infrastructure vendors and operators to roll out the high bandwidth services promised by successive releases of the 3GPP LTE-A standard.
For more information, visit www.aeroflex.com.
