Verizon and Ericsson launch 5G on trial-basis across U.S.

Verizon and Ericsson enabled an operational shift of 5G network from technology trials to pre-commercial pilots in the field in multiple cities across United States of America.

The fixed wireless, pre-commercial customer pilots, scheduled to begin in the first half of 2017, will enable the refining of an end-to-end 5G network using a mixture of new technology and existing Verizon infrastructure.

By working closely with Verizon, Ericsson has been able to identify deployment challenges and develop the techniques required for a quick and scalable deployment.

"Verizon is driving the commercial deployment of 5G with the collaboration and innovation of the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, including partners like Ericsson," said Ed Chan, Senior VP, Technology Strategy and Planning at Verizon.

The end-to-end 5G pre-commercial customer pilot begins in the subscriber location. Fixed wireless subscribers will use a variety of applications, many of them centered on video, bi-directional and/or low-latency. Ericsson has been testing various applications across the 5G network to evaluate the application behavior.

"Ericsson 5G Radios have been providing multi-gigabit speeds into subscriber locations by using advanced radio techniques. For example, beamforming can be used to find the best path for the 28GHz radio signal to reach the user," revealed Arun Bansal, Head-Business Unit Network Products, Ericsson.

5G technologies in both radio and the core network will enable operators to provide new services to their customers due to higher bandwidth and lower latency. The fully virtualised core also enables network slicing.

Verizon's pre-commercial customer pilot will span multiple deployment scenarios, geographies and RF morphologies. New techniques are being developed in order to meet the constraints associated with massive 5G small cell deployments. Results from the pilot are vital to a scalable deployment.

According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, there will be 550 million 5G subscriptions globally in 2022. North America is projected to lead the way with 25 percent of all mobile subscriptions forecast to be 5G by 2022, representing the highest market penetration in the world.