The CTO of Tele2 Estonia, Ervins Kampans, has stated that this year the operator is aiming to achieve theoretical peak download speeds of 300Mb/s for LTE.
Despite the fact that Tele2 Estonia has enough spectrum resources to do so, Kampans also confirmed that the operator would not be using three-band carrier aggregation (CA) across the 800MHz, 1.8GHz and 2.6GHz bands.
The approach has been adopted by South Korean providers SK Telecom and LG Uplus, but Kampans felt the technology was too immature. However, he noted that Tele2 Estonia was open to adopting tri-band CA in the future.
This leaves the operator with two options for achieving its 300Mb/s target. It could either opt to deploy 4×4 MIMO technology, or use two-band CA across the 1.8GHz and 2.6GHz bands. Its LTE network will be built on equipment from NSN.
The operator is currently using the 1.8GHz and 2.6GHz bands to deploy LTE, but it also acquired 800MHz frequencies in January which it will use to provide nationwide coverage.
Kampans notes that a key issue is the availability of LTE-compatible devices, which are not widely available yet in Estonia. However, he has stated his belief that smartphones supporting high-speed mobile broadband will be available around the end of 2014 or early 2015.
