Ericsson said it has successfully completed the first commercial implementation of Ericsson Elastic Radio Access Network (RAN) for SoftBank's mobile network in Tokyo station area, one of the busiest train stations in the world.
With Ericsson’s Elastic RAN, every Ericsson Radio System LTE baseband unit can coordinate with any adjacent one, whether in a centralized, distributed or hybrid network architecture. Coordinating and aggregating cell carriers improves user data speeds and overall network performance and supports the operator’s migration to Cloud RAN.
Ericsson claims that the results of the Tokyo train station commercial implementation show that downlink throughput increased by up to 40 percent during peak hours for commuters with three carrier aggregation enabled smartphones.
To further enhance the user's mobile broadband experience in Japan, SoftBank will continue to deploy Ericsson Elastic RAN throughout dense urban network areas. As strategic partners, Ericsson and SoftBank will also work on further development of Elastic RAN to continue the enhancement of this capability.
Hideyuki Tsukuda, Senior Vice President and Deputy Head of Technology Unit, SoftBank Corp
We are excited to partner with Ericsson in the first introduction of the Elastic RAN solution to enable peak performance of the most advanced smartphones in the world, in the densest and most challenging areas of our network.
Mikael Eriksson, Head of Ericsson Japan
This makes inter-cell coordination complex, which is critical to the aggregation of cell carriers required to achieve high performance. Elastic RAN introduces a new paradigm with respect to the way we achieve inter-cell coordination by creating borderless coordination areas.
