Smart drives mobile data traffic with stepped-up LTE-A

PLDT wireless subsidiary Smart Communications, Inc (Smart)’s accelerated deployment of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced sites nationwide has further driven mobile data usage, which increased faster than industry growth in the first half of the year.

To date, more than 60% of Smart’s sites nationwide have already been upgraded to LTE, while 62% of Smart’s LTE sites across the country are already LTE-A capable. Amid these network upgrade efforts, mobile data traffic grew by 79% in the first half of 2018 compared to the first half of 2017, higher than the industry year-on-year growth of 54% for the same period.

Smart has also fired up up to 5-component-carrier (5CC) aggregation in Metro Manila’s most populous metropolis, Quezon City. It has previously activated 5CC in Boracay and Marikina, where speeds of over 500 Mbps were achieved using 5CC-capable smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S9.

Carrier aggregation (CA) is a feature of LTE-A which enables the combination of two or more radio frequency bands in order to deliver bigger bandwidth and much faster data speeds to mobile phone users. 2-Component Carrier (2CC) carrier aggregation features the combination of two frequencies, while 3CC involves the combination of three frequencies, 4CC combines four bands, and 5CC, five bands. /