Trialing 5G-ready connectivity
An innovative cellular air-ground-air (AGA) trial between Teracom and Ericsson is extending mission-critical broadband coverage further and higher than ever before, providing a launchpad for digital transformation across even the most demanding and remote public safety and first responder use cases – today and tomorrow.
Highlights
Challenges
As one of the leading radio and television operators in the Nordics, Teracom delivers nationwide communications services to public and private national critical infrastructure enterprises. Their networks have traditionally served an important function for emergency preparedness, with a condition that it must be able to broadcast under most circumstances. While such narrowband networks provide high reliability, their limited data load capacity and range restrict them to supporting use cases such as voice-only and short messaging services.
Solutions
A unique spectrum strategy
As part of the trial, Teracom and Ericsson deployed services in both the low-band 450 MHz range – ensuring wider reach, better propagation and more suitable coverage for remote location sites; as well as the 2.3 GHz range, ensuring high-performance 5G-ready capacity for data-heavy and latency-sensitive operational services.
Ericsson Massive MIMO
This approach has been supported by Ericsson Massive MIMO’s built-in capability to enable ad-hoc hardware reconfiguration, with the dynamic and versatile solution enabling Teracom to use the same radio hardware to meet the coverage requirements of both ground-based and airborne use cases at zero plane positioning – unlike traditional AGA deployments where the hardware is typically pivoted skywards.
Results
The feedback from the wide range of public safety actors involved in the trial has been extremely positive, regarding both the network coverage and data capacity performance. It also successfully demonstrates that cellular AGA, also known as ATG, air-to-ground, connectivity can provide the necessary coverage and data capacity to support future advanced digital technologies for public safety operations both on the ground and in the air.
