Telecom major Verizon has used CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) band 48 spectrum in an LTE Advanced carrier aggregation demonstration in the U.S. to offer higher network capacity and speed to users.
Recently, Verizon reached over 1 gigabit download speed on its LTE network.
Chipset company Qualcomm and telecom equipment maker Ericsson are the technology partners for both achievements.
Federal government for radar systems have primarily used the CBRS band which is made up of 150 MHz of 3.5 GHz shared spectrum.
The FCC has authorized shared use of the band with wireless small cells. Using the LTE Advanced feature of carrier aggregation, Verizon demonstrated LTE with carrier aggregation on this band and carried wireless traffic. Federated Wireless provided the Spectrum Access System to prioritize traffic within the FCC’s spectrum sharing framework for this band.
“The use of CBRS spectrum advances our work in emerging spectrum bands. CBRS spectrum will lead to greater capacity and speed for our customers,” said Nicola Palmer, wireless chief network officer for Verizon.
“By leveraging CBRS spectrum enabling additional LTE carrier aggregation, we continue to lead the way to meet customers speed and capacity demands. We plan to introduce Ericsson Radio System for CBRS band across macro, micro and in-building segments, starting with the Radio Dot,” said Nishant Batra, head of Product Area Network Infrastructure, Ericsson.
The demo in an Ericsson lab in Plano, TX included the CBRS communication flow, using 2×20 MHz LTE carriers on the CBRS band 48, and employing 256 QAM modulation in the downlink.
Ericsson said it provided the band 48 Radio Dot System and Domain Proxy for communication with Federated SAS. Qualcomm Technologies provided a Qualcomm Snapdragon LTE modem test device, and Federated Wireless provided the spectrum management service with their Spectrum Controller.
Joe Glynn, vice president, Business Development at Qualcomm Technologies, and Iyad Tarazi, CEO at Federated Wireless were part of the demonstration.
