Ericsson, Qualcomm and Verizon team up for CBRS carrier aggregation trial

It’s a trio which we have been hearing a lot from recently, but Ericsson, Verizon and Qualcomm have teamed up again to announce what they claim is another first for the US.

This time the trio opened up their warm embrace to bring Federated Wireless into the fold as the team used the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band 48 spectrum in an LTE Advanced carrier aggregation demonstration.

“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.

“As industry leaders we work tirelessly to provide the best mobile experience available – that includes always innovating through new technologies and software platforms to better serve our customers.”

The CBRS band is made up from 150 MHz of 3.5 GHz shared spectrum, primarily being used to date by the federal government for radar systems, though the FCC has authorized shared use of the band with wireless small cells, for the demonstration. Using LTE Advanced feature of carrier aggregation, the team was able to demonstrate 4G speeds.

The demonstration itself took place in an Ericsson lab in Plano, Texas, using 2×20 MHz LTE carriers on the CBRS band 48, and employing a 256 QAM modulation in the downlink. Ericsson provided the band 48 Radio Dot System and Domain Proxy for communication, while Qualcomm provided a Snapdragon LTE modem test device.

“This end-to-end CBRS deployment is an exciting milestone,” said Iyad Tarazi, CEO at Federated Wireless, which provided the Spectrum Access System to dynamically prioritize traffic within the FCC’s spectrum sharing framework for this band. “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.”

Elsewhere in the Ericsson world, the team paired up with SmarTone to launch what it has described as a successful trial of Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology in a live over-the-air demonstration in Hong Kong.

SmarTone used one LTE 10 MHz band aggregated with three 20MHz bands of unlicensed spectrum for the trial, making use of 4CC carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO and 256QAM technologies, to provide customers with a mobile broadband experience with more capacity and faster speeds. LAA is a key technology in the step-change towards Gigabit LTE.

“LAA is a key evolution of mobile technology and we are pleased to be first in Hong Kong together with SmarTone to demonstrate the increased capacity, improved speeds and enhanced user experience through the combination of licensed and unlicensed spectrum,” said Petra Schirren, President of Ericsson Hong Kong and Macau.

“Through the introduction of advanced technologies, such as LAA, we enable Gigabit Class LTE on the road to 5G.”