NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel customers may soon be able to experience upto 500 mbps data speeds on the 4G network in the country as the telco is preparing to commercially deploy a new technology to increase the network capacity to offer these high-speeds.The Sunil Mittal-led telco on Friday said that it has successfully conducted India’s first trial of Licensed Assisted Access ( LAA ) technology over a live LTE network in collaboration with Sweden's Ericsson . The latest development is a step taken by Airtel in the direction of its 5G preparedness and to build networks to offer gigabit per second speeds.The telco said that data download speeds of over 500 Mbps were recorded on smartphones in an indoor environment during the trial. In outdoor environment, peak download speed of more than 400Mbps was achieved with coverage of about 180 meters from the base station."Airtel has always led the introduction of cutting edge network technologies to serve its customers. We are pleased to partner Ericsson to conduct India’s first LAA trial, which is also a big step towards 5G and Gigabit networks. LAA is an important technology evolution that can truly unlock the power of 4G LTE networks by leveraging unutilized unlicensed spectrum," Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer of Bharti Airtel said in a statement.Airtel had previously commercially deployed LTE-Advanced or 4G+ using carrier aggregation technology across TDD-LTE and FDD-LTE to deliver mobile data speeds up to 135 Mbps. It has been deploying carrier aggregation (CA) technologies to club together fragmented spectrum bands to virtually create larger airwave blocks. This process helps offer faster and more stable 4G services for users, a key competitive tool.The latest tool, LAA, is a key technology as operators evolve their networks to achieve Gigabit LTE by opening up previously untapped resources of unlicensed spectrum delivering speeds once thought only possible over fiber.The LAA technology enables the use of unlicensed spectrum in the 5 GHz band in combination with the licensed spectrum. With this, the subscribers get a massively enhanced mobile broadband experience and ultra-fast speeds while, operators make efficient use of unlicensed spectrum resources, Airtel said in a statement.Airtel said that the trial was conducted in Delhi-NCR. Airtel used one LTE 5 MHz carrier aggregated with three 20 MHz carriers of unlicensed spectrum. Together with 4CC carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM technologies, the trial was conducted using Ericsson Radio System.Nitin Bansal, Head of Network Solutions, South East Asia, Oceania and India at Ericsson states, “LAA is a key evolution of mobile technology and we are pleased to be partnering with Airtel to demonstrate the increased capacity, improved speeds and enhanced user experience through the combination of licensed and unlicensed spectrum.”