IRVING, Texas -- Leading companies and vendors from across the wireless industry have come together at Verizon’s facility in Irving, Texas to accelerate using 4G LTE technology over the CBRS (Citizen Band Radio Spectrum) spectrum. After the successful initial trials last year, Corning, Ericsson, Federated Wireless, Google, Nokia and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated are all collaborating in end-to-end system testing to further develop the use of this new spectrum.

The CBRS band is made up of 150 MHz of 3.5 GHz shared spectrum which until now has been primarily used by the federal government for radar systems. The FCC authorized shared use of the spectrum with wireless small cells in 2016. By using LTE Advanced technology and carrier aggregation, Verizon will be able to use this shared spectrum to add capacity to its network. Verizon customers will benefit from more capacity, higher peak speeds and faster throughput when accessing the network.

The end-to-end system tests are designed to accomplish several goals on the path to widespread commercial deployment:

For the end-to-end system testing, Federated Wireless and Google are providing prioritization through the Spectrum Access System (SAS) that dynamically prioritizes traffic within the FCC’s spectrum sharing framework for this band. Qualcomm Technologies is providing the Qualcomm Snapdragon TM LTE modem needed to access LTE on CBRS on mobile devices. Corning, Ericsson and Nokia have provided indoor and outdoor radio solutions which can run on the CBRS Spectrum. Corning provided a SpiderCloud Enterprise RAN composed of a Services Node and SCRN-330 Radio Nodes.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)