Ericsson has extended its 20-year strategic partnership with Entel, the largest telecommunications company in Chile, to evolve Entel’s network towards 5G by deploying its latest LTE FDD network and LTE TDD Massive MIMO technologies.
The deal marks Entel as the first operator in Latin America to deploy Massive MIMO nationwide. Entel will also evolve the Radio Network Controllers and EVO controllers across the network, including remote locations such as Easter Island, and upgrade the transport network with the introduction of Ericsson’s microwave solutions, a section of which now tap into E-band spectrum to cater for capacity increases in backhaul and fronthaul.
Within the agreement, Ericsson will also deliver several strategic core network projects intended to upgrade Entel’s voice and data networks to the latest generation in order to provide new end-user services, enable increased broadband capacity and higher data speeds, enhanced voice quality, optimized latency, and reduced network operation costs.
Among these projects is a fully virtualized network service (VNS) for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) including virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (vIMS) and virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) for VoLTE. vIMS is a core network solution that delivers rich real-time communication services for both consumer and business users over any access network and for any device types, including smartphones, tablets, wearables and laptops.
Supported communication services include HD voice (VoLTE), Wi-Fi calling and video calling. The NFV infrastructure solution includes the Hyperscale Datacenter Solution 8000 (HDS 8000), Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment (ECEE) and Ericsson Cloud Manager (ECM). The ECM and Ericsson Network Manager (ENM) will help orchestrate the rollout of Entel’s nationwide VoLTE service.
Additionally, Ericsson introduces its Adaptive Network Inventory solution (EAI) which will become an integral part of Entel’s Digital Transformation project. Deployment of the core network projects begins immediately and will be completed in different phases throughout 2018 and 2019.
Alfredo Parot, VP of Technologies and Operations, Entel
Now, as we evolve our network to capture the new business opportunities of Gigabit LTE and the evolution towards 5G and IoT, we naturally extend this partnership with Ericsson in these areas.
Arun Bansal, SVP and Head of Market Area Europe and Latin America, Ericsson
With mobile traffic volumes expected to increase exponentially through 2020 and beyond, operators around the world are bolstering their existing networks to deliver higher speeds and lower latency to their subscribers.
