The UK’s largest MNO, BT-owned EE, has taken a more creative approach to maximizing the return on its spectrum assets, compared to many of its peers. It was an early adopter of advanced carrier aggregation (CA) to support LTE-Advanced and is now refarming some surplus 3G airwaves to move to five-band CA, one of the foundations for its 5G strategy. The operator will refarm some 3G spectrum to boost speeds from about 500 mobile towers over the next six months, mainly in urban areas. As 3G usage declines in favor of LTE, EE is not using all its 2.1 GHz 3G airwaves. 3G refarming has often been delayed, for many MNOs, by the need to move customers off circuit switched…