Carrier Aggregation Shines in Spotlight with Taylor Swift-inspired Metrics

Recent announcements by major North American mobile service providers are once again putting carrier aggregation in the spotlight.

On January 7, 2025, Verizon announced the achievement of 5.5Gbps download speeds—"the equivalent of downloading 266 Taylor Swift albums a minute or streaming 3,056 Hulu episodes per hour.” 

T-Mobile followed suit on March 18, with a press release quantifying its 6-carrier aggregation field-test speed of 6.3Gbps. 

Attributing this technique as an enabling technology, mobile operators and carrier aggregation partners around the globe claim to be achieving record-breaking speeds, shattering speed barriers, and redefining what speed really means.

Making public commitments to push the boundaries of 5G, service providers are building networks that truly deliver on performance, reliability, and innovation and doubling down to support an evolving landscape of massive mobile service consumption.

Those who succeed in launching this type of “super network” are poised to address the many challenges associated with delivering a quality experience for video calls, streaming entertainment, gaming, and 5G private network-enabled factories.

And, with speed and capacity now being measured in terms that end users can relate to, operators are going all in to serve their subscribers. But how do service providers know carrier aggregation is really working once they go live on the production network?

What Is Carrier Aggregation, and How Does It Work?

Simply put, carrier aggregation (CA) is a software functionality used to efficiently combine multiple frequency blocks, or carriers, to serve an individual end user with the highest quality of experience.

Applicable in areas with overlapping cell coverage, CA is used to strategically select and schedule a combination of available frequency blocks to deliver the desired performance whether the blocks are contiguous in the same frequency band, separated by a gap (intraband noncontiguous) or on a different frequency band altogether (interband).

By assigning multiple frequency blocks or component carriers to the same user, maximum data rates and experience with advanced 5G services and applications are possible.

Joining multiple radio channels together via a well-performing CA strategy, mobile operators can increase the overall transmission bandwidth available to individual mobile devices, improving network coverage and reliability. With an effective CA approach in place, mobile networks can support more simultaneous users and improve network efficiency by optimizing the use of available spectrum resources.

So, What Can Go Wrong?

While the use of CA is widespread, our customers have said there are still a number of challenges they need to address in order to reap the benefits of the approach.

Although CA leverages multiple frequencies, carriers, or bands to deliver higher throughput and better user experience, operators still have limited visibility into the performance of these combinations, leaving them with three burning questions.

1. Which bands are used more and less frequently?
2. Which band combinations are causing the most challenges or creating the most issues inside of the network?
3. What is the root cause of radio connectivity failures? 

Fortunately, NETSCOUT has designed a solution to address these issues via its Smart Data analytics, deep packet inspection, and, more recently, automation with AI digital assistance.

How NETSCOUT Helps

During a Fierce Wireless interview with Senza Fili’s Monica Paolini at Mobile World Congress, NETSCOUT’s Karsten Gaenger introduced the new capabilities designed to help existing radio access network (RAN) teams drive more efficient assessment of multicarrier and band-combination performance.

As Gaenger explained, NETSCOUT’s automated capacity analytics solution empowers RAN teams to quickly determine the devices impacted by poorly performing multiband operation.

With the addition of automation capabilities", he said, “our solution can pinpoint user equipment [UE] and cells that are having issues with certain types of carrier aggregation—something that is very hard to detect manually due to its stateful behavior and the millions of permutations for band combinations for UE types, cells, and calls happening on a daily basis.

Learn more about NETSCOUT’s automated RAN solutions.