Verizon and Ericsson are taking 5G from technology trials to pre-commercial pilots in the field in multiple cities across the United States. The fixed wireless, pre-commercial customer pilots, scheduled to begin in the 1st half of 2017, will enable the refining of an end-to-end 5G network using a mixture of new technology and existing Verizon infrastructure.
By working closely with Verizon, Ericsson said it has been able to identify deployment challenges and develop the techniques required for a quick and scalable deployment.
The end-to-end 5G pre-commercial 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.
Verizon's pre-commercial 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 pilot are vital to a scalable deployment, said Ericsson.
Ed Chan, SVP, Technology Strategy and Planning, Verizon
Verizon is driving the commercial deployment of 5G with the collaboration and innovation of the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, including partners like Ericsson. This partnership keeps us on-track to be first to bring 5G to Verizon customers.
Arun Bansal, Head of Business Unit Network Products, Ericsson
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.
