Successful LTE/CBRS trial on Verizon's network

Verizon, Ericsson, Federated Wireless and Qualcomm Technologies have successfully tested 4G LTE technology over Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum in Verizon’s US live commercial network.

Following successful initial trials last year and ongoing work to advance the CBRS ecosystem in Verizon’s lab in Texas, this real-world deployment marks the beginning of public access to the 150 MHz bandwidth of 3.5 GHz shared spectrum which until now has been used by the US federal government for radar systems.

“As more people use more wireless devices to do more things in more places, building a network to stay ahead of customer demand is crucial,” said Mike Haberman, VP Network Engineering for Verizon.

“This shared spectrum resource is a critical component of our strategy to add capacity to our network.”

The deployment in Florida used a combination of Verizon licensed AWS and 700 MHz spectrum aggregated with 50 MHz of CBRS band 48 spectrum.

The combination of the LTE Advanced features of multiple antennas, 256 QAM, and carrier aggregation across shared and licensed spectrum, produced peak speeds of 790 Mbps.

The deployments involved outdoor and in-building systems.

“We have been aggressively working over the past several years on deploying LTE Advanced features. We’ve fully deployed carrier aggregation in our licensed spectrum across our network in over 2,000 markets, and have 4X4 MIMO and 256 QAM deployed in over 810 markets nationwide for our customers,” said Haberman.

“Combining those features with this shared spectrum band will provide more capacity, higher peak speeds and faster throughput when accessing the network for our customers who have come to expect the latest technology and highest reliability from Verizon.”

For this deployment, Ericsson provided Ericsson Radio DOT systems for indoor and Radio 2208 for outdoor, Qualcomm Technologies provided the Qualcomm Snapdragon TM 845 mobile test device with X20 LTE for access to CBRS on mobile devices, and Federated Wireless provided the prioritisation through their Spectrum Controller, a Spectrum Access System (SAS) that dynamically allocates channels within the FCC’s spectrum sharing framework for this band.

Ericsson also provided the domain proxy to enable the radios to communicate with the Federated Wireless Spectrum Controller.

According to Verizon, this marks the beginning of commercial deployment of LTE on CBRS spectrum. Devices that can access the CBRS spectrum are expected in 2018.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/kstudija

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