BARCELONA, Spain – The agreement was announced in Barcelona at the GSMA's Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023, as both Ericsson and nbn reconfirmed their mutual commitment to the mission of enabling greater connectivity for all Australians.

One of the first initiatives to be delivered under the terms of the MoU will see nbn become the first operator to deploy Ericsson's extended range mmWave functionality – offering current capability up to a range of 6.9 kilometres – within its Fixed Wireless commercial network, with the extended coverage meaning more people across Australia than ever before will be able to gain access to the fixed wireless network.

As the first network in the world to deploy Ericsson's world-leading software in the field, the insights and learnings gained from this initiative will be instrumental in developing the ecosystem for long-range mmWave access globally, and exploring new use cases for the technology and the network.

In addition to validating Ericsson's software in the commercial network, the companies are continually investing considerable effort in trialling the extended range mmWave capability in nbn's field testing environment at one of nbn's test sites near Mortlake, Victoria. This has recently resulted in successfully achieving an extended range mmWave transmission of over 10km in field tests. This milestone follows the previous world first achievement set in 2021, when the two companies were the first to set a 5G long-range transmission world record, helping to prove the case for mmWave to be used for long-range environments.

As a second key initiative, Ericsson is developing mid-band Massive MIMO features such as optimized multi-user MIMO pairing, specifically tailoring these developments in response to the nbn Fixed Wireless network access scenarios. With these advancements, nbn™ will be able to improve spectrum efficiency and uplift capacity.

The MoU follows the recent ten-year partnership extension between Ericsson and NBN Co in November 2022. Under the exclusive agreement, Ericsson will supply nbn™ with the next-generation technology critical to enabling 5G in many existing towers across the nbn™ Fixed Wireless network.

Read the full press release here.

Ericsson