Optus Taps Ericsson to Bring 5G on 50 sites across Australia

Optus’ 5G rollout momentum continues to build with the announcement of a new live 5G site in Kellyville, in Sydney’s north-west.

The site is one of 50 sites to be built by Ericsson across Sydney and Melbourne over the coming months as part of Optus’ multi-vendor 5G rollout.

Using Ericsson’s 5G RAN equipment the site has achieved a working end to end solution based on 3GPP standards, utilising third-party customer premises equipment (CPE) test device on Optus’ 3.5 GHz spectrum with a channel bandwidth of 60 MHz.

“This is another significant milestone for Optus as we continue with our customer focused 5G roll-out plan. We are further demonstrating that our multi-vendor approach to Optus 5G will help to deliver a more dynamic and innovative 5G network for the benefit of our customers,” Dennis Wong, Optus’ Managing Director Networks said.

“With our fourth live 5G site now live we are building towards a truly game-changing year for Optus and our customers. Our next generation network build is now well and truly in full swing with site roll out planned over the coming months.

“Last week we revealed our plans for Optus 5G Home Broadband and we are working closely with Ericsson to conduct critical inter-operability device testing so that we can deliver a compatible 5G home broadband product to customers and open this site up as part of our expressions of interest campaign,” added Wong.

The new live 5G site in Kellyville follows Optus’ announcement last week of three live 5G sites located in Canberra and Sydney.

Optus plans to deliver 1,200 5G sites across the ACT, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia by March 2020 and will announce the locations of the first 50 Ericsson sites over the coming months.