Verizon and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) have taken 5G out of the lab and into the field in multiple cities across the United States. The fixed wireless, pre-commercial customer pilots are enabling the evaluation of an end-to-end 5G network using a mixture of new technology and existing Verizon infrastructure.
By working closely with Verizon, Ericsson has been able to identify deployment challenges and develop the techniques required for a quick and scalable deployment.
Roger Gurnani, Chief Technology Officer, Verizon, says: “Verizon is driving towards the first commercial deployment of 5G with the collaboration and innovation of the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, including partners like Ericsson. This innovation has us on-track to be first with commercial 5G.”
The end-to-end 5G customer pilot begins in the subscriber location. Fixed wireless subscribers will use a variety of applications, many of them centered on video, bi-directional and/or low-latency. Ericsson has been field testing various applications across the 5G network to evaluate the application behavior.
Arun Bansal, Head of Business Unit Network Products at Ericsson, says: “Ericsson 5G Radios have been providing multi-gigabit speeds into subscriber locations by using advanced radio techniques. For example, beamforming can be used to find the best path for the 28GHz radio signal to reach the user.”
5G technologies in both the radio and the core network will enable operators to provide new services to their customers due to higher bandwidth and lower latency. The fully virtualized core enables network slicing, with fixed being the first slice of many for the next generation core network.
Verizon’s customer pilot will span multiple deployment scenarios, geographies and RF morphologies. New techniques are being developed in order to meet the constraints associated with massive 5G small cell deployments. The learnings from the pilotare vital to a scalable deployment.
Leading the way in 5G
According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, there will be 550 million 5G subscriptions globally in 2022. Latin America expected to have two million 5G subscriptions in 2022. North America is projected to lead the way with 25 percent of all mobile subscriptions forecast to be 5G by 2022, representing the highest market penetration in the world.
