du, the Middle East’s fastest growing telecommunications service provider, recently announced the successful introduction of an LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) live network, making it the  first telco with CAT-6* ready LTE network in the UAE.

The launch of the LTE-A Carrier Aggregation capability allows du to offer mobile broadband speeds up to 225 Mbps – providing an enhanced user experience in terms of upload or download speeds or audio and video streaming. This also invites more smartphone manufacturers to launch an expanded range of LTE-A CAT-6 handsets in the UAE.

Saleem AlBlooshi, executive vice president of  network development and operations at du, says in a press release, “This is a result of our “smart investment” strategy that puts customers at the heart of our focus and we are very keen on introducing capabilities that can be utilized and experienced by our customers immediately, much beyond simply focusing on announcing higher speeds. Having said that, it is important to note that we have invested in such technology once we started to get confirmation from the major smartphone manufacturers that this capability (a.k.a. CAT-6 capable handsets) is readily available in many of these new smartphones already launched in the UAE. With our launch of LTE-A in the UAE, customers using any of these new CAT-6 smartphones will enjoy new unprecedented speeds when in an area covered using this new technology.”

* CAT-6 denotes the LTE Handset Category information (Category 6) which is used to allow the Mobile Network to communicate at a higher speed and be able to combine two bands as specified in 3GPP. The CAT-6 commercial smartphones started to be available at the beginning of 2015.