Evolution to 5G: Verizon, Ericsson showcasing use cases at Mobile World Congress Americas

Visitors to Verizon’s booth (N 842 in the Moscone Convention Center) will see first-hand the new CBRS spectrum at work, and new concepts and use cases including 5G enhanced intelligent video surveillance and drone powered by edge compute.

At Mobile World Congress Americas 2017 this week, Verizon and Ericsson will showcase technology milestones and use cases demonstrating continued industry leadership as LTE evolves, paving the way to 5G.

Experts from both Ericsson and Verizon will be on hand to personally walk visitors through the innovative demonstrations.

The joint Verizon and Ericsson demonstrations will include:

•LTE on CBRS: Verizon, Ericsson, Qualcomm and Federated Wireless will demonstrate the first use of CBRS band 48 spectrum for LTE with carrier aggregation using a true band 48 radio in the Ericsson Radio Dot System, Qualcomm MTP, Federated Wireless Spectrum Access System (SAS) and domain proxy in the Ericsson Network Manager.

This group was the first to use this newly authorized spectrum an innovative spectrum sharing scheme, and will allow cellular systems to tap into 150 MHz of new spectrum in buildings and small cell clusters. The demonstration will showcase the possibility of both operator mobile broadband and private LTE use cases on the same radio.

•5G enhanced intelligent video surveillance: Today, 4G LTE is used to connect surveillance cameras across cities in the US. With 5G, there will be significantly more capacity to stream the captured video back to the network and support large numbers of cameras, enabling new levels of intelligence. With all streams coming to a central, video optimized repository in the core of the 5G network, additional analysis can be applied, providing actionable intelligence for end users. This 5G enhancement to an existing 4G solution will provide benefits across smart cities, marketing insights for retail, and security.

•Drone powered by edge compute: The Verizon and Ericsson Distributed Edge Cloud amplifies the power of simple drones to match or exceed the capabilities of complex drones, which are much more expensive. This proof of concept demonstration shows that as intelligence and processing are moved to the 5G core and the very edge of the network, existing device constraints will be lifted, enabling advanced applications with low cost devices. This new kind of architecture will provide benefits to augmented and virtual reality use cases as well as industrial control and intelligent transport systems.

Three industry milestones in one month

"Verizon has led the charge in deploying the latest technologies and harnessing unlicensed spectrum with our pioneering work on LTE-U/LAA and 3.5 GHz—putting us in a great position to continue providing the best network experience and to further extend our lead through 4G LTE Advanced features," said Nicola Palmer, Verizon Wireless chief network officer.

These latest technologies are part of the evolution of LTE, using LTE Advanced features, enhancing capacity and speed on the Verizon 4G LTE network. Verizon, Ericsson and Qualcomm have used these latest technologies to hit three industry firsts/milestones just last month:

•By combining licensed and unlicensed bands with 4-carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM, we jointly achieved 953 Mbps in a real-world deployment in Florida. Verizon is already selling devices that are enabled to take advantage of this technology, including the Moto Z2 Force and Samsung Note 8, with more to come this year.

•The three companies also recently deployed the first end-to-end use of band 48 CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) 3.5 GHz spectrum in an LTE Advanced carrier aggregation demonstration, greatly advancing our work in this emerging band.

•Using three carrier aggregation, we achieved another industry first with more than 1 Gbps speeds on our 4G LTE network.