In June 2013, Qualcomm Technologies powered the world’s first LTE Advanced carrier aggregation launch using industry-leading Qualcomm Snapdragon^TM 800 chipsets, integrated with third-generation Qualcomm Gobi^TM LTE modems. As a first step, the launch supported aggregation of two 10 MHz carriers enabling peak data rates of 150 Mbps (Cat 4).

The increased data rates of carrier aggregation can be traded off to get twice or more capacity for bursty applications, while maintaining the same user experience, under typical network loading conditions. As evident, when carriers are aggregated, there are more resources, but due to trunking efficiency the overall capacity can be much more than the sum total of the capacity of the individual carriers. The increased capacity will help operators to address bursty smartphone traffic as well as increased use of social media applications, instant messaging and others.

The current aggregation of two 10 MHz carriers is only the beginning. It will evolve in many directions. In the near term, there could be aggregation across more carriers—up to five defined in LTE Advanced—and more band combinations—more than 45 being defined in 3GPP; aggregation in the uplink etc. There is currently work going on to facilitate aggregation across cells on the same carrier for load balancing, called MultiFlow; aggregation across paired and unpaired spectrum (LTE FDD and TDD) and many more.