Vodafone and Ericsson to Boost Speed of 4G Network in Southern England

Mobile operator Vodafone has signed a new deal with Ericsson to upgrade their 4G network in London and Southern England by installing the latest LTE-Advanced based Carrier Aggregation (CA) and Massive MIMO technologies, which should boost Mobile Broadband speeds.

The CA technology allows Mobile Network Operators and end-user devices to support the use of several radio spectrum bands at the same time in order to boost performance, which is further aided by the adoption of Massive MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) to harness multiple transmitters and receivers (antennas). Some aspects of this upgrade will also be used by future 5G technologies.

Jorge Fernandes, Vodafone UK’s Technology Director, said:

“We are continually enhancing our network to optimize performance and give our customers the best possible experience. We will continue to expand our 4G network and develop greater capabilities for our customers. We look forward to continuing to work with Ericsson in order to achieve our goals.”

Arun Bansal, Ericsson’s Head of Europe and Latin America, added:

“We are working with Vodafone UK to evolve its 4G network and test new 5G technologies. Together we will enable ubiquitous connectivity for their users that enable entirely new experiences, as well as monitoring and control of IoT in real time.”

Sadly the announcement doesn’t include a time-scale for the upgrade or any details of the roll-out locations, which is sadly a fairly normal trend for most mobile operators. However we’d expect to see this resulting in speeds that get close to the 400Mbps+ upgrade that EE is rolling out in several cities, provided it’s fuelled with enough spectrum and capacity (your Smartphone would also need to support it).

Ericsson and Vodafone have also signed a memorandum of understanding that will cover the following areas of collaboration:

The MoU Agreement

* 4G evolution, 5G radio non-standalone and standalone;
* 5G site deployment scenarios;
* NR simulations: 3.5 GHz and mmWave;
* 5G use-cases: business case study and proof of concept;
* distributed cloud and network slicing proof of concept: end-to-end latency and cloud- optimized network applications;
* collaboration with King’s College London; and
* 5G innovation: Technology Incubation Programme.