Ericsson announced today that it had increased its US footprint by expanding its 4G partnership with Verizon to include new markets.
This extended partnership includes Ericsson Radio System 4G LTE equipment which, in addition to enabling the latest advances in 4G LTE capabilities, will provide a 5G-ready platform that will allow Verizon to rapidly transition sites to 5G when they deploy the service in those markets, the company said in a statement.
The new markets will be deployed using Ericsson’s latest baseband and dual band radios, an optimizsed solution for widescale high-capacity deployment. The solution will be software upgradeable to 5G and will deliver CAT-M and NB-IoT for Massive Internet of Things use cases, as well as industry-leading network capacity.
Verizon and Ericsson have partnered closely to drive the evolution of LTE by using LTE-Advanced features, enhancing capacity and speed on the Verizon 4G LTE network. In 2017, Verizon and Ericsson used these latest technologies to hit several industry milestones, including:
- Achieved 953 Mbps by combining licensed and unlicensed bands with four-carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM in a real-world network environment in Florida
- Exceeded 1 Gbps speeds on the Verizon 4G LTE network using three-carrier aggregation
Ed Chan, Senior Vice President of Technology, Strategy, and Planning, Verizon, said, “We continue to be committed to bringing the best network to Verizon customers. Working with Ericsson allows us to deploy the latest technologies on our 4G LTE-Advanced network will be an important component of our rapid transition to 5G.”
This 4G LTE deployment will improve both spectral and energy efficiency, increasing network capacity for current devices in the market. Further enhancements are expected as the 5G ecosystem evolves. For customers, the result will be faster speeds for using apps and uploading and downloading files.
Image Credit: Ericsson