Verizon was working in partnership with Ericsson, Qualcomm and Federated Wireless in the project, which completed the first ever use of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band-48 spectrum in a demonstration using carrier aggregation in LTE Advanced.
“This end-to-end CBRS deployment is an exciting milestone,” said Iyad Tarazi, CEO at Federated Wireless. “The CBRS ecosystem has truly reached full commercial viability, and Verizon will soon be able to enhance its customers’ experience with this latest wireless network innovation.”
The CBRS is traditionally used by government for radar systems, and it is made up of 150MHz of 3.5GHz shared spectrum. Earlier this year, the FCC authorised shared use of the band with other wireless small cells.
“The use of CBRS spectrum greatly advances our work in emerging spectrum bands. Verizon and our partners are leading the way in creating an ecosystem around the use of CBRS spectrum which will lead to greater capacity and speed for our customers,” said Nicola Palmer, wireless chief network officer for Verizon.
The demonstration took place in the Ericsson Lab in Plano, Texas, and included end-to-end CBRS communication flow, using 2x20 MHz LTE carriers on the CBRS band 48, using a 256 QAM modulation in the downlink. Ericsson provided the band 48 Radio Dot System and domain proxy, Qualcomm Technologies provided a Snapdragon LTE modem test device, while Federated Wireless provided the spectrum management service with its spectrum controller, all over Verizon’s network.
“By leveraging CBRS spectrum enabling additional LTE carrier aggregation, we continue to lead the way to meet customers speed and capacity demands. We are proud to be working across the industry to develop new capabilities and advancements on LTE. We plan to introduce a full portfolio of Ericsson Radio System for CBRS band across macro, micro and in-building segments, starting with the Radio Dot, to serve our customers’ needs holistically,” said Nishant Batra, vice president and head of network infrastructure at Ericsson.
“We are excited to demonstrate the support for new types of spectrum in Snapdragon LTE modems,” added Joe Glynn, vice president, business development at Qualcomm Technologies. “The use of LTE Advanced with carrier aggregation will help enable the use of new CBRS shared spectrum to offer higher network capacity, and ultimately, higher speed to users than currently available.”
