Ubiik has announced FCC approval for their goRAN™ pLTE base station, designed for Band 54 (1670-1675 MHz). pLTE stands for Private LTE. This new base station is key building block in the expansion of the Band 54 ecosystem, the FCC approval of the goRAN™ will allow utilities and owners of critical infrastructure the ability to immediately leverage the 5 MHz of contiguous, greenfield spectrum offered by the band.
"The fact that Band 54 is immediately available for use nationwide, is 3GPP standardized, has excellent propagation characteristics, and offers 5 MHz bandwidth is appealing to our utility customers," says Fabien Petitgrand, CTO, Ubiik. "We have designed goRAN™ as a solution-in-a-box for ease of deployment. This means our customers can choose whether to use their own specified core or one that we have built into the base station directly."
As Band 54 is Time Division Duplex (TDD) spectrum, the ability to build a network with different ratios of uplink vs downlink slots has also proved attractive to utility customers. "Utilities are often uplink heavy network users due to the amount of device monitoring required. Deploying a pLTE network in a TDD spectrum removes the requirement to pair channels for uplink and downlink which brings the customer a much greater degree of flexibility in how they use their network," says Petitgrand. "Furthermore, Ubiik's goRAN™ supports TDD LTE-M (Cat-M1) which is a future-proof, long-term technology embraced within 5G."
With compliance in progress for a variety of UEs, including a utility hardened endpoint, Pyxis LTE, utilities looking for a more affordable approach to deploying a pLTE network will have a range of options available in this band. A demo version of the goRAN™ pLTE base station for Band 54 will be on display at the Ubiik Mimomax booth (#1011) at the upcoming UTC T'n'T event in Mobile Alabama, May 20-24.
Click here to learn more about ubiik's goRAN™ pLTE base station.
