Verizon has launched the first live LTE network on the shared 3.5 GHz band in the US. In cooperation with Ericsson, Federated Wireless and Qualcomm Technologies, the company used the spectrum known as Citizens Broadband Radio Service on its live commercial network in Florida. The first devices supporting the spectrum are expected to be available by the end of 2018.
The companies first trialed the new system last year in Verizon’s lab in Texas. The live launch marks the beginning of public access to the 150 MHz bandwidth of 3.5 GHz shared spectrum which until now has been used by the federal government for radar systems.
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. The deployments in Florida involved outdoor and in-building systems. Combining those features with the shared spectrum band will provide more capacity, higher peak speeds and faster throughput for customers, Verizon said.
Ericsson provided its Radio DOT system for indoor and Radio 2208 for outdoor, Qualcomm Technologies provided the Snapdragon 845 mobile test device with X20 LTE modem for access to CBRS on mobile devices, and Federated Wireless provided the prioritization through its Spectrum Controller, a Spectrum Access System 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.
