Verizon, Ericsson, Qualcomm and Federated Wireless have joined forces to carry out what the partners describe as the first 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 3.5 GHz shared spectrum which until now has been primarily used by the federal government for radar systems.
Federated Wireless provided the Spectrum Access System to dynamically prioritise traffic within the FCC's spectrum sharing framework for this band, said the partners. The demo was held in an Ericsson lab in Plano (Texas) and used 2x20 MHz LTE carriers plus a 256 QAM modulation in the downlink.
In a statement, the partners said Ericsson provided the band 48 Radio Dot System and Domain Proxy for communication with Federated SAS. Qualcomm Technologies provided a Snapdragon LTE modem test device and Federated Wireless provided the spectrum management service with its spectrum controller. "The use of CBRS spectrum greatly advances our work in emerging spectrum bands," said Verizon’s wireless chief network officer Nicola Palmer.
The successful demo comes after Federated Wireless in February announced that its spectrum controller had been granted conditional certification from the FCC. Google is also working on developing equipment for CBRS.
