How Three Ireland built a leading 5G network

Last Summer, Three Ireland entered into a contract with Ericsson with high ambitions and multiple transformational aims. These included a full 4G replacement, the deployment of full 5G Core, and the aim of achieving rapid 5G deployment with a best-in-class network performance.

As soon as everything was signed, Ericsson’s CEO, Börje Ekholm, came and met us in Dublin, and we felt assured that the project was getting a high focus. The executive sponsorship from Ericsson played a vital role in speeding up the process, as well as the teams of experts that were put in place by Head of Ericsson UK and Ireland, John Griffin. The network has 2400 sites and today, we’ve swapped out around 600 of them, deployed 5G, and gone live with Ericsson’s cloud core. Since we began the swap-out with Ericsson, we’ve made rapid progress. A lot of hard work has gone into this deployment and it could not have been achieved without a close collaboration and frequent, weekly communication. We’ve had very good uplifts of 4G network speeds and performance, and we were able to launch 5G in just one year. We have a 37.5% population coverage, so our network is widely available and allows us to reach Three customers in every county across the country. Swapping to an Ericsson base station has also meant that we’ve been able to deploy 5G in very hard-to-reach places in rural areas. When the pandemic hit, we saw a big shift in traffic distribution in the network. We not only met the heavier rural demand, but now all those rural areas have 5G providing plenty of consumer benefits.  

Achieving rapid 5G deployment in rapid time with Ericsson

From early on, Three Ireland decided that 5G was the future and we wanted to differentiate ourselves from our competitors on our 5G service. With over two thirds of all mobile data in Ireland carried on our network, it goes without saying that our network works extremely hard. In making such a large investment in 5G, we wanted to make sure that we got the most value out of it, and of course, to put our trust in Ericsson’s technology.

Considering we only started our 5G rollout with Ericsson last year, we’ve made huge progress. Ericsson has proved to be an ideal partner to us, not only in our experience with Core and hitting our milestones, but also in meeting our 5G ambitions. Today, our dedicated spectrum has given us a much larger 5G footprint and a very differentiated performance from 4G networks—something which I feel has given Three Ireland a big advantage.

What 5G means for Ireland

Undoubtedly, 5G networks will play a huge role in the economy, just as 4G is currently doing, particularly with lockdown restrictions continuously being enforced. We've seen a surge in data traffic for collaborative applications over the past six months, very likely as a result of the imposed restrictions to everyday life. But our success with Ericsson has given us a lot of confidence, and as a result, this has enabled and empowered us to provide our customer base with all the benefits of 5G. For example, we’re the first operator in the country to offer Prepay customers as well as Bill pay customers a 5G experience. In making 5G available to our entire customer base, it shows just how hard we at Three Ireland have committed to making 5G widely accessible. By operating a more efficient network, we can provide improved services and support to our customers.

Networks have never been more important than now. As it stands, we see traffic migrating to 5G, and 4G network performance improving. We realise that high connectivity is critical for our customers—not just for business purposes, of course, but also to keep in touch with loved ones.

Looking to the future, we are already making network and services more efficient at Three Ireland by going live with IoT slicing, which will maintain our network robustness and help us to gain a level of excellence in managing our mobile network. Our goals are to move beyond connectivity and evolve more into service creation areas. To meet the challenges of rural connectivity, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) is undoubtedly the most logical solution at the edge of fibre networks as we need deeper fibre penetration in rural areas for connected 5G networks. We see FWA providing a much quicker and cost-effective solution and I’m convinced it’ll play a significant role in solving the rural broadband conundrum. Ericsson 5G will help us enable this and I look forward to many more future innovations to come out of this collaboration.

Learn more

Ericsson and Three launch 5G in Ireland
5G Core
5G by Ericsson