Telcos including Google, Nokia and Qualcomm have formed an alliance promoting the use of shared 3.5GHz spectrum in the United States.
The so-called Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band has been identified as a means of meeting growing data demands in the country.
The CBRS Alliance also comprises Federated Wireless, Intel and Ruckus Wireless. The companies had announced a partnership in February to explore the potential of the band after it was opened by the United States’s Federal Communications Commission for commercial use.
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The alliance will be involved in developing, marketing and promoting LTE-based solutions using the shared spectrum band.
It will also support attempts to standardised specific technology for the 3.5GHz band, including radio interfaces to the spectrum access system and protection of coexistence among the band’s users.
Stefan Pongratz, Senior Director, Carrier Economics and Mobile RAN Market Research at Dell’Oro Group, said: “With 80 percent of the data consumed indoors and 95 percent of the radio access network (RAN) Capex allocated to the outdoors, new solutions that produce negligible interference with legacy macro and Wi-Fi systems and are inherently designed to support multiple operators will likely play an essential role to normalise the location asymmetry between data consumption and mobile infrastructure investment.”
Field trials of the Alliance’s sharing technology will take place between now and the end of 2016.
Neville Meijers, Vice President Business Development for Qualcomm Technologies and Chairman of the board for the CBRS Alliance, added: “There is ever-growing demand for LTE-based solutions in 3.5 GHz bands and expansion of the wireless footprint. Working together, the CBRS Alliance aims to enable the entire industry to address demand by expanding the capacity of new technologies.”