Wireless Carrier Aggregation

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. 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. 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. 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 has in mind for this capability—it's a great solution for short bursts, but it could be an expensive and wasteful use of valuable spectrum longer term.