Small update:
I think you're right - it probably is 3Mhz. The upload speeds aren't the same as 5Mhz upload speeds. Good thing the download speeds were average (as good/bad as Mobilink's - but then, I only tested it at one location, so it's hardly a fair test).
Did some research. And this is true.
Two sources:
- source 1:
http://home.eps.hw.ac.uk/~fsh12/LTE_CA.pdf (a bit technical, so I skipped the maths but understood the gist).
- source 2:
Carrier Aggregation explained (see the brief text below figure 3).
Source 2 says
"Different component carriers can be planned to provide different coverage, i.e. different cell size. In the case of inter-band carrier aggregation the component carriers will experience different pathloss, which increases with increasing frequency."
I decided to read more on the path loss (which is a consequence of buildings and other obstructions - but a more technical term for SNR, if you will), and came across source 1, which essentially says:
- page 2: under the heading of non-contiguous CA, it says
"The radio channel characteristics such as path loss, building penetration loss and Doppler shift will vary significantly at different frequency bands which cause large differences on the received power". In other words, CA in different bands will help increase the throughput.
- page 3: didn't make sense because it was all mathematical calculations. Skipped.
- page 4: experimented with CA on different frequencies and spectrums: 10 Mhz @ 800Mhz and 20Mhz @ 2600Mhz. Even though bandwidth is doubled on 2.6Ghz, the speed throughput only increased by 50% (there's a graph) because it's
"...mainly due to the higher path loss at 2.6 GHz" (poor penetration and speeds, unless you're next to the transmitter) and
"the spectral efficiency of 10 MHz at 800 MHz outperforms the 20 MHz at 2.6 GHz although it is half the bandwidth."
- The interesting bit? They did another experiment: 10Mhz @ 800Mhz and 10Mhz @ 2.6Ghz (both same b/w, unlike the previous experiment).
"Fig. 4 shows that the cell throughput with aggregation of 10 MHz at 800 MHz and 10 MHz at 2.6 GHz is 50% higher compared to single 20 MHz carrier at 2.6 GHz due to frequency diversity." My suspicions were right - an increase in the
contiguous spectrum in only one band benefits the end-user when they're receiving stellar signals.
- this is the important bit:
"This is due to high path loss at 2.6 GHz and high building penetration loss. On the other hand, the users located near the eNodeB have higher throughput at 2.6 GHz..." when 2.6Ghz has 20Mhz vs. 10 Mhz of 800 MHz
"...sincethey can access to larger bandwidth at good signal levels."..."As shown in Fig. 5 the user throughput ... with CA in the coverage area is superior compared to single band operation using the same total bandwidths due to multi-diversity gain."
These are your answers, boys and girls (do we have any girls here?). Telenor, in this case, does have a fighting chance if those ludicrous lunatics implement CA, since signal quality isn't strong everywhere - so this might give them similar level of performance, or even better in some cases vs. Zong or Mobilink.
Who's excited?