Ericsson Qualcomm and Swisscom have been co-operating to bring 5G/4G spectrum sharing to Swisscom’s nation mobile network. Swisscom was the first service provider in Europe to launch 5G services commercially last April, using the 3.6 GHz band. Telstra and Optus in Australia have been following a similar trajectory towards 5G.
For local operators rolling out 3.6 GHz 5G site by site is going to take a long time and lots of additional sites to anywhere near match the coverage of the current 4G networks underpinned by the 700MHz Band 28 LTE. What the three big players plan for Switzerland is to dramatically improve the coverage of 5G by sharing low band spectrum currently in heavy use on 4G on Swisscom’s new 5G network. In so doing they plan to provide 5G coverage of 90 percent of the Swiss population by end of 2019.
Ericsson Spectrum Sharing is embedded in Ericsson Radio System. It provides a smooth transition from 4G to 5G nationwide coverage through a network software upgrade. The feature will dynamically share spectrum between 4G and 5G carriers based on traffic demand. The switch between carriers happens within milliseconds. This will allow initially small amounts of low band FDD spectrum to be used on 5G with increasingly more used on 5G as the number of 5G devices grows. The feature is compatible with all 5G FDD capable smartphones and other devices based on the Qualcomm® Snapdragon 5G Mobile Platform, supporting the standardised spectrum sharing functionality.
This would seem to be an ideal fit for Telstra to accelerate the provision of coverage of its 5G network which is presently suffering from a surplus of advertising and a deficit of availability.