Verizon’s vice president of network support, Mike Haberman, recently held a roundtable discussion with reporters covering Verizon’s plans for 2015 concerning network development. Haberman committed Verizon to carrier aggregation, a few other LTE Advanced features and hinted at being able to purchase a LTE femtocell in order to boost coverage indoors.
Verizon is playing a little bit of catch-up as carrier aggregation is already being implemented by AT&T, with T-Mobile and Sprint having already promised to do the same in 2015.
Not sure what carrier aggregation is? Imagine living in a city with no major highways, just city streets. Now picture taking some of these streets and merging them together to create interstates. So carrier aggregation combines network roads to create consolidated, high-speed network highways.
In technical terms, Haberman stated that Verizon carrier aggregation will be able to aggregate 10×10 MHz blocks in the 700 MHz band and 20×20 MHz AWS blocks to create 30×30 MHz channels.
Unfortunately, most devices at this time cannot support such a feature. A software update will need to be issued out to phones capable of supporting this, but if you own an older smartphone, you may be out of luck.
Also discussed was MIMO. As of now, Verizon only supports 2×2 MIMO, but Haberman said that support for 4×4 MIMO is coming.
Last, but not least, Haberman talked about a LTE femtocell available for purchase in 2015. This accessory would allow customers to boost their signal strength indoors. So if you live in a home that hampers your signal, this gadget can help remedy the situation. Haberman said the device will be available for anyone.
Source: FierceWireless
