Hong Kong's fourth largest mobile operator, SmarTone has selected Ericsson as its sole supplier for core and RAN equipment over the next five years.
As part of the agreement, the companies will introduce ‘4.5G’ LTE-Advanced and LTE-Advanced Pro technologies and plan to conduct early trials and pilot deployments of key pre-5G technologies from this quarter.
Ericsson will help SmarTone upgrade and expand its network infrastructure and refarm more spectrum for LTE network. It will also deploy a variety of core network solutions, including the network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined network (SDN), to improve network performance and efficiency.
SmarTone said that network evolution towards 5G will make the network capacity to grow exponentially, and help virtual reality and machine-to-machine applications and other innovative applications bring new business opportunities.
Early this year, SmarTone partnered with Ericsson to optimise its network for WeChat, the most popular social networking app in China that boast an estimated 650 million monthly active users worldwide.
