Vodafone Spain is working with its long term partner, Huawei, to test a broadband line that is part VDSL and part LTE, and would help carriers achieve their dream of being able to pool wireline and wireless capacity to improve the economics of home broadband.
The idea is that a single router can combine throughput from two sources, bonding the IP signals into one. This would help when the load on the fixed line was bursting above the available rate since it could augment the signal with LTE, or it could simply augment capacity overall. In the Spanish test, the feat was achieved using Huawei’s AR169 and AR1220W router and was said to increase download speeds up to 200Mbps and upload speeds of 60Mbps, with the systems configured to handle periods of congestion.
Other uses would occur if broadband lines were down or suffering high latency, since the LTE signal could replace it or hurry it along. Of course, there are some issues with this, especially since many operators aim to deliver LTE to the home via gateways or small cells, backhauled by the broadband line. So if the VDSL was not performing, the LTE signal would be lost too (although in some instances, carriers have looked at diverting a neighbor’s LTE signal if required, to avoid single points of failure).
Back in June, Huawei and Vodafone said they were experimenting with GSM-LTE Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, switching local cells that are using GSM technology into LTE cells temporarily, using Huawei’s Single Radio Controller. This is another strategy for handling congestion within LTE cells. The company said that it took the 10MHz paired spectrum in GSM and added half of it to the 10MHz LTE signal without interfering with surrounding GSM signals, to add 50% to throughput for LTE.