Ericsson is big on little cells. The new RBS 6402 is an indoor cell aimed at giving mobile coverage within what Ericsson calls “smaller buildings and venues”, but you might think of as still being pretty big – around 5,000 square metres.

What makes it special is that it’s the first picocell to support carrier aggregation, which gives up to 300Mbps on 4G. In our Monopoly pub crawl mobe coverage survey we found that carrier aggregation gave EE a huge advantage in performance and Vodafone revealed to us that it too will have carrier aggregation very soon.

With increasing demand from the mobile networks you can see why Ericsson has big hopes for its new picocell. The device is designed to be easy to install, with Ericsson claiming that it can be “network-live in ten minutes with innovative plug-and-play installation leveraging self-organizing (SON) features and existing Ethernet.”

If a network buys some new spectrum it can remotely activate frequencies, bands and features.

As the first picocell with carrier aggregation, the RBS 6402 delivers twice the capacity and speed, supporting LTE. It’s the only multi-carrier, multi-standard (LTE, WCDMA and Wi-Fi) and mixed-mode small cell to support ten different bands, with two 3GPP bands (LTE and WCDMA) plus 802.11ac Wi-Fi operating simultaneously to deliver higher peak rates and capacity.

It integrates LTE and 3G radio access with Wi-Fi using Ericsson’s industry-first Real-Time Traffic Steering to dynamically and seamlessly shift the mobile device connection between networks. It also uses LTE-Advanced and supports VoLTE. ®