Turkcell, Ericsson and Qualcomm, demoed live 3-Carrier High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (3C-HSDPA) test on a commercial network, recording 63 Mbps downlink speed.

They tested three carrier data download and also two carrier data upload technologies for the first time in the world.

Three-Carrier HSDPA test, which has utilized a feature in Ericsson’s forthcoming software release 15A, is aimed at increasing user speeds for downlink by up to 50 percent throughout the entire cell compared to single carrier.

Turkcell, Ericsson, Qualcomm conducted the demo in 2.1GHz band in a WCDMA commercial network using three 5 MHz carriers for downlink and two 5MHz carriers for uplink within the 2.1GHz frequency band owned by Turkcell. Ericsson supplied core network and radio access network nodes for the test.

Bulent Elonu, chief network technology officer, Turkcell, said: “Data download using three carrier has been tested for the first time on a network globally.”

Turkcell currently has a Dual-Carrier HSDPA network supporting speeds of up to 43.2 Mbps in downlink and 5.76 Mbps in uplink.

3C-HSDPA is designed to allow simultaneous downlink transmissions on up to three 5 MHz carriers to a single user. It supports both single-band transmission where the 3 carriers reside in the same frequency band and dual-band transmissions where the 3 carriers are spread across two frequency band.

The demo included Enhanced Uplink Multi-carrier (EUL-MC), an Ericsson software release 14B feature, which increases uplink speeds by up to 100 percent. During the demo, uplink speed improvements of 100 percent were recorded.

EUL-MC is designed to allow simultaneous uplink transmissions on two 5MHz carriers to a single user offering peak rates of up to 11.5 Mbps and up to 100 percent gain in user speed.

3C-HSDPA and EUL-MC, the next steps in HSPA multi-carrier evolution, are anticipated to be commercially available in devices during the second half of 2014.