Alphabet, Qualcomm and Nokia were among six wireless industry titans who came together this week to accelerate the development and roll out of LTE-based solutions for the 3.5 GHz band.
The new Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) Alliance so far includes six top companies in the wireless space, including Alphabet’s Access Technologies, Federated Wireless, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm and Brocade’s Ruckus Wireless. The companies said they came together on this project because they believe access to spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band will be “critical to meet rapidly expanding wireless data demands.”
The Alliance formalizes a previously announced commitment from the companies to collaborate on an ecosystem that would make 3.5 GHz solutions widely available.
“There is ever-growing demand for LTE-based solutions in 3.5 GHz bands and expansion of the wireless footprint,” Qualcomm’s vice president of business development and CBRS Alliance chairman Neville Meijers said. “Working together, the CBRS Alliance aims to enable the entire industry to address demand by expanding the capacity of new technologies.”
The CBRS Alliance said it believes LTE-based solutions in the 3.5 GHz band that utilize shared spectrum will facilitate a massive expansion of both indoor and outdoor coverage and capacity. The Alliance said it is developing an official certification process for successful deployments of CBRS infrastructure and is aiming to conduct LTE CBRS field trials in the second half of this year.
“With 80 percent of the data consumed indoors and 95 percent of the radio access network (RAN) Capex allocated to the outdoors, new solutions that produce negligible interference with legacy macro and Wi-Fi systems and are inherently designed to support multiple operators will likely play an essential role to normalize the location asymmetry between data consumption and mobile infrastructure investment,” Stefan Pongratz, senior director of carrier economics and mobile RAN market research at Dell’Oro Group, said in the Alliance’s press release.
The move follows the FCC’s decision last year to open up 150 MHz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band for commercial use and comes ahead of expected allocations in the 3.5 GHz band in several other countries.
Filed Under: Telecommunications (Spectrum)
