Ericsson has scored a significant deal win to help out UK operator EE with its customer experience management efforts.

The real significance of this for Ericsson will be as an endorsement of its Expert Analytics as it’s not exactly synonymous CEM. And that’s not for want of trying as Ericsson has been involved in BSS/OSS for some time and has been desperate to diversify away from just flogging radios, etc, to operators. But as we see time and time again, diversification it not easy.

“This is another significant milestone in our relationship with EE and an important deal for us in the field of IT,” said Arun Bansal, Head of Market Area Europe and Latin America for Ericsson. “The introduction of Ericsson Expert Analytics will enable more effective customer care and service operations, allowing EE to proactively resolve issues before they have an impact on subscriber satisfaction.”

“With Ericsson Expert Analytics supporting our new customer experience management capability, we will be better able to understand our customers’ experience in real-time, and the detailed insights provided will help us keep improving network quality,” acquiesced Dave Salam, EE Director of Mobility and Analytics.

Elsewhere Ericsson got together with Qualcomm and MTS in Russia to deploy Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) in that county for the first time. In case you forgot, LAA is a technology that augments licensed radio frequencies with unlicensed ones. The announcement claims this deployment achieved Gigabit LTE speeds in Ufa City.

“This is the first LAA network in Russia and Eastern Europe and an important milestone on the way to 5G,” said Andrey Ushatsky, VP of Technology and IT at MTS. “LAA will allow us to build gigabit LTE networks quickly and cost-effectively in places with active traffic consumption, where operators do not always have enough available frequencies in the licensed spectrum.”

“LAA gives service providers access to new spectrum, increasing network capacity and supporting both higher peak rates and higher-than-average speed rates,” said Sebastian Tolstoy, Head of Ericsson Russia. “This commercial LAA rollout marks another important milestone in our strategic cooperation with MTS. Earlier we achieved peak throughput data rates of 25 Gbps at our joint 5G trial. The next step is to prepare for a new demonstration of enhanced 5G capabilities during the football tournament in Russia this year.”

Qualcomm delivered its standard brand of undiluted self-promotion. The deployment, which took place in a large trade center on May 17, featured 256-QAM and 4CC carrier aggregation of 10 streams with 4×4 MIMO on a 20MHz licensed carrier coupled with 3x20MHz LAA.