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T-Mobile recently announced that it was able to aggregate six channels of spectrum into one bandwidth signal to a customer. The ability to wed channels together was one of the promises of the original 5G specification. Verizon says it has been able to aggregate seven channels of spectrum for a single customer.
The test combined two channels of 2.5 GHz, two channels of PCS spectrum, and two channels of AWS spectrum, creating an effective 245 MHz of aggregated channels. T-Mobile worked with Ericsson and Qualcomm to make this work and was able to create a single 3.6 Gbps connection from a cell tower. The tests looked at using aggregated channels for download or upload.
The original 5G specifications envisioned that 5G could be used to give each customer exactly the amount of bandwidth that is needed for a transaction. If a customer is trying to download a gigantic file, the vision was they would be given the large bandwidth needed to get the job finished faster. The 5G vision was to minimize the impact on a cell tower by getting transactions done quickly, thus freeing up the spectrum to use for somebody else.
The original 5G specification also went the opposite direction with network slicing to be able to give a customer a tiny bandwidth channel if that is all that is needed. Currently, a customer gets a full channel assigned for a cellular connection even if they are barely using the bandwidth.
The primary purpose for both of these changes was to be as efficient at a cell tower as possible, which would mean that more customers could be connected at any time, particularly at busy times of the day.
It’s hard to imagine what T-Mobile and Verizon have in mind for this capability. The downside to combining six or seven channels for a given customer is that those channels are not available for anybody else. It’s a great solution for short bursts, but this would really eat into a cell site’s capacity if these connections were permanent or even for short periods of time. It is possible that a cell site could be used to make gigabit connections to large customers, but that seems like an expensive and wasteful use of valuable spectrum.
One of the possible uses of this capability would be at a small cell site that is constructed solely for the benefit of a large industrial or business customer. Large companies are always looking for a second or third source of bandwidth for redundancy and resiliency, and this open the possibility of using the cellular network for redundancy. This capability would allow a cellular carrier to make a high-bandwidth connection without having to introduce a different set of radios.
According to the original vision of 5G, all of these changes would have been integrated into cellular networks by now. We’re still only at the early stage of 5G, where carriers don’t do a lot more than provide a second set of frequencies to spread out network usage. However, it’s pretty obvious by now that none of the extra revenue streams that were envisioned for 5G ever materialized – and that means the carriers have lost the appetite for introducing expensive new features that don’t bring extra money.
This use of channel aggregation seems to be a way to use 5G to make money – at least in some limited circumstances. This implies that a cellular carrier could offer a fast (and expensive) broadband connection anywhere they have fiber and can place a small cell site.
