Ericsson has bagged a major contract to build Gigabit LTE and 5G transformation for Swisscom, a telecom operator in Switzerland.

Ericsson earlier announced its Gigabit LTE and 5G deal with Entel, a leading telecom operator in Chile.

Ericsson will support the digital transformation of Swisscom’s network to roll out Gigabit LTE in 2018 and deployment of 5G mobile in 2020.

Swisscom said that transformation includes the deployment of Ericsson’s full stack telco cloud solution with network slicing technologies, and 5G portfolio offering with Massive MIMO for improvement in spectrum efficiency.

Swisscom aims to accelerate the development of innovative enterprise use cases built on Massive Machine Type Communication (MTC) and Critical MTC in fields such as factory automation, smart grids, intelligent mobility and digital health.

In summer 2017, Swisscom and Ericsson demonstrated applications based on 5G network slicing and NB-IoT to empower digital transformation of enterprise processes and fulfill critical communication needs.

“We invest massively in the latest mobile network technologies such as Gigabit LTE and 5G to deliver greater innovation and provide customers with the best experiences,” said Heinz Herren, CIO and CTO at Swisscom.

Arun Bansal, head of Europe and Latin America at Ericsson, said investment in 5G is enabling market opportunities for operators, industries and society as a whole.

Ericsson and Swisscom are working on an upgrade of the network to achieve speeds that will exceed 1 Gbps. The first sites will be upgraded in 11 Swiss cities by the end of 2017.

In addition, customers will also benefit from a boost in network capacity. Swisscom’s nationwide 4G network already covers 60 percent of the population with speeds of 450 Mbps and 80 percent with speeds of 300 Mbps.