Verizon and T-Mobile Advance 5G Strategy with CBRS, Carrier Aggregation Moves

The highly competitive nature of the US mobile wireless business continues as Verizon announced that it is deploying 5G in the CBRS spectrum band and T-Mobile said it achieved speeds above 3 Gbps on a production network using 5G carrier aggregation. Verizon said it worked with Ericsson to complete a 5G data session using CBRS General Authorized Access (GAA) spectrum, which is mid-band spectrum that is essentially available on an unlicensed basis. The company will be able to use the spectrum to augment the licensed spectrum that it has in the same band. Verizon was a big winner in the CBRS auction of 2020. Verizon’s plan is to use CBRS spectrum for Ultra Wideband 5G, which is the term the company uses for the higher-speed 5G service that it has deployed using millimeter wave spectrum and in the company’s C-band spectrum, which is considered mid-band. T-Mobile said its 5G carrier aggregation achievement was only possible using the company’s standalone 5G network. The company merged three channels of mid-band spectrum – two channels in the 2.5 GHz band and one channel of 1900 MHz spectrum – to create what was essentially a single 210 MHz channel. T-Mobile said it already uses carrier aggregation to combine two 2.5 GHz 5G channels for “greater speeds, performance and capacity.” The company expects to begin adding a third 1900 MHz 5G channel later in 2022.