Verizon, Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies and Federated Wireless have announced the first ever use of CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) band 48 spectrum in an LTE Advanced carrier aggregation demonstration.
The CBRS band is made up of 150 MHz of the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band which until now has been primarily used by the federal government for radar systems. The FCC has authorized shared use of the band with wireless small cells. Using the LTE Advanced feature of carrier aggregation, Verizon, Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies and Federated Wireless were able to demonstrate LTE with carrier aggregation on this band and carry wireless traffic. Federated Wireless provided the Spectrum Access System to dynamically prioritize traffic within the FCC's spectrum sharing framework for this band.
The demo, set in an Ericsson lab in Plano, TX included the end-to-end CBRS communication flow, using 2 x 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 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.
A full, live demo will be available for viewing at the upcoming Mobile World Congress Americas in California in mid September.
