Australia’s Optus has reportedly deployed what it claimed to be the first triple-band 4G/5G radio unit in Asia, doing so in collaboration with Ericsson. In a press release regarding the development, the Swedish vendor claimed that the solution ‘will play a key role in easing site deployment challenges enabling Optus to accelerate the roll out of its super-fast 5G network’.
According to Ericsson the deployment of its triple-band Radio 4466 allows Optus to concurrently enable 5G and 4G services across 1800MHz, 2100MHz and 2600MHz spectrum layers with a single unit, reducing the equipment normally required. This provides an optimised solution while simultaneously reducing the site equipment footprint, overall power consumption and time to deployment. The first triple-band radio unit has been commercially deployed at Macquarie Park in Sydney with rollout continuing ‘over the coming months’, it said.
Commenting, Lambo Kanagaratnam, Vice President Networks at Optus, said: ‘The use of these triple-band radio units as part of our site deployment will alleviate challenges where existing site structures and lease areas are unable to cater for multiple radio units, which then impacts the amount of radio equipment that can be installed at each site … Being able to install 5G and 4G together, as one radio unit, means that we can continue to meet increasing demand from our customers for speed and capacity, while reducing our own impact on the environment.’