Breaking the Gigabit Barrier on Commercial 5G NSA - Tri-Carrier Aggregation in the Real World

5G NR
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1

This is not a controlled lab benchmark.
These results were recorded on a commercial Docomo network in central Tokyo using a Pixel 8 under live network conditions.

  • Download Speed: 1,040 Mbps
  • Upload Speed: 102 Mbps (LTE uplink, not shown in screenshot)
  • Connection Mode: 5G NSA
  • Device: Pixel 8

Carrier Aggregation Configuration

  • n78: 100 MHz (NR)
  • B1: 15 MHz (LTE)
  • B19: 10 MHz (LTE)

Total Aggregated Spectrum: 125 MHz
CA Combination: DC1A_19A_n78A

Operating under 3GPP Rel-15 conditions with 4x4 MIMO and ZSN enabled, throughput approached expected theoretical efficiency for this spectrum configuration.

Because this is an NSA deployment, uplink traffic remains LTE-only, which is why upload performance is typically lower or hidden in many speed test captures.

This is not “peak lab performance” - it represents realistic, field-measured effective throughput on a live urban network.

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Can a commercial 5G network really achieve speeds like this?

2

Achieving this level of throughput on 5G is no longer unusual - it has become fairly common on mature commercial networks.

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A year ago, 5G NSA carrier aggregation on a live commercial network was already capable of reaching speeds up to 1.7 Gbps.

3

How are your 5G NSA networks achieving these speeds?

4

And how many users were connected to that cell site at the time?

5

How do you check how many users are connected to the cell/site at that moment?

How do you enable carrier aggregation on a 5G NSA network?

6

Bro… big and very deep question :disguised_face:

7

You can see the live UE count per NR cell from the OSS.

DSP NRCELLUENUMBER
(real-time number of active User Equipment (UE) in a 5G cell)

DSP NRCELLUENUMBER
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Does anyone know?

8

Only God knows​:goblin:

9

There are already live NSA tests reaching around 1.5 Gbps using 5CC on LTE and 2CC on NR in the downlink.

10

What’s the MML command on the 5G network?

LST CAMGTCFG

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On the 4G network it’s set to 2CC.

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I don’t know if it’s on the 5G network.

11

Yes, because you have 2 carrier in 4G.

That command is for 4G.

13

What happens when this is run to 5G?

14

You only have one NR carrier on 5G, right?

15

Yes, BS 3 only has a single n78 sector carrier active.

16

If there’s only one NR carrier, then NR-CA cannot work.

And yes - true 5G carrier aggregation is mainly for SA.
In NSA, what you usually see is EN-DC with LTE + NR aggregation, not pure NR-CA.

17

Okay, but with NSA alone you eventually hit a limit - without additional NR carriers, there’s not much room left to increase speed further.

18

What’s the utilization?

19

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How did they achieve such speed on the NSA 5G network?

20

5G SA is theoretically capable of reaching up to 20 Gbps, while 5G NSA can achieve around 4.5 Gbps under advanced EN-DC and carrier aggregation configurations.

21

What bandwidth are you running on your 5G deployment?

And what MIMO are you using?