The commercial deployment of LTE on the CBRS wireless spectrum ecosystem in the US took a major step forward with the successful test of 4G LTE technology over CBRS on Verizon’s live commercial network. The test was jointly conducted by Ericsson, Verizon, Qualcomm and Federated Wireless.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had recently approved the 3.5 GHz CBRS band for LTE use to improve wireless broadband access and performance in the US. The CBRS band Comprises of 150 MHz in the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum band. This band had primarily been used by the federal government for radar systems. The FCC decision means the band has been approved for shared use with wireless small cells. The shared spectrum approach is seen as key to meeting service providers’ network capacity challenges as data demands increase.
Describing the Florida test, which comprised of both indoor and outdoor systems, as marking the beginning of commercial deployment of LTE on CBRS spectrum, Verizon said devices that can access the CBRS spectrum are expected in 2018.
THE TEST:
- Ericsson provided Ericsson Radio DOT system for indoor and Radio 2208 for outdoor for the test
- 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 these LTE Advanced features of multiple antennas, 256 QAM, and carrier aggregation across shared and licensed spectrum produced peak speeds of 790 Mbps
- Qualcomm provided the Snapdragon 845 mobile test device with X20 LTE for access to CBRS on mobile devices
- Federated Wireless provided the prioritization 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.
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