UAE based Etisalat says that it has carried out trials of LTE A based services based on hardware supplied by Alcatel Lucent.

The trials were based on carrier aggregation of spectrum in its 1800MHz and 800MHz bands.

Etisalat made the first LTE-A call following regulatory permission to use the technology with 40MHz band carriers. The live demo of an LTE-A call was conducted where Etisalat transferred data across its live network on various sites across Abu Dhabi carrying commercial traffic.

Saeed Al Zarouni, Senior Vice President, Business Planning and Technology Evolution, said,

As part of our network expansion initiative, huge investments have been made into fibre optic networks connecting 4G LTE base stations. Etisalat is currently in the process of introducing additional stations allocated to cover main roads, buildings, airports, and shopping centres. By the end of 2014, the 4G LTE network will comprise of 4000 base stations.”

The mobile network did not indicate when it might deploy LTE-A commercially though.