Vodafone UK announced agreements with Ericsson “to evolve its 4G networks” with Massive MIMO and carrier aggregation technologies, as well as a broader partnership to collaborate on developing 5G.

Evolve 4G
In a statement, Vodafone UK said it had selected Ericsson to provide both technologies and develop 4G in London and southern England.

The move is designed to “help deliver improved capacity and end-user performance” said Vodafone, and the scope of the agreement includes technology trials, product validation and commercial deployment, as well as professional services.

At an event at its Newbury headquarters last week, Vodafone trumpeted its network evolution plans, stating Massive MIMO was key to improving network performance.

The company said it was leading the way in Europe with its deployment of 64 element Massive MIMO technology from China-based vendor Huawei.

Jorge Fernandes, technology director at Vodafone UK, said the latest partnership with Ericsson would help it “continually enhance our network to optimise performance and give our customers the best possible experience”.

5G
The two also announced they have also signed a memorandum of understanding covering a number of different areas of collaboration around 5G.

These include evolving 4G to 5G radio developments, including non-standalone and standalone, 5G site deployment scenarios, new radio simulations on both 3.5GHz and mmWave spectrum, and identifying 5G use cases.

The companies will also look at distributed cloud and network slicing proof of concepts, end-to-end latency and cloud optimised network applications.

Arun Bansal, SVP and head of Europe and Latin America at Ericsson, said the companies aimed to “enable ubiquitous connectivity” for customers and enable “new experiences, as well as monitoring and control of IoT in real time”.