Entel, the largest telecom company in Chile, has selected Ericsson for the deployment of its Gigabit LTE network paving the way for 5G in future.
Ericsson, which has been working with Entel for the past 20-years, said Entel will be the first mobile operator in Latin America to deploy Massive MIMO nationwide.
Entel will be deploying LTE FDD network technologies and LTE TDD Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) paving the way for 5G. This will allow Entel to increase its competitiveness and capture additional revenue streams.
Entel heads the market with 35.7 percent of mobile connections as of March 2016. Movistar had 34.3 percent, while Claro’s share was 24.1 percent, according to telecom regulator Subsecretaria de Telecomunicaciones (SUBTEL).
eMarketer projects that the number of mobile phone users in Chile will reach 13 million in 2016, a 1.5 percent increase. Mobile phone user penetration will rise slightly from 73.9 percent this year to 75.1 percent in 2020, when 13.7 million individuals will regularly use a mobile phone.
Ericsson will start the deployment of the core network projects immediately targeting in different phases throughout 2018 and 2019.
Entel will evolve the Radio Network Controllers and EVO controllers across the network, including remote locations such as Easter Island, and upgrade the transport network with the introduction of Ericsson’s microwave solutions. Ericsson’s microwave solutions support Entel’s E-band spectrum to cater for capacity increases in backhaul and fronthaul.
“As we evolve our network to capture the business opportunities of Gigabit LTE and the evolution towards 5G and IoT, we extend this partnership with Ericsson in these areas. Our subscribers and enterprise customers will enjoy the benefits of a very high performance network in the region for years to come,” said Alfredo Parot, vice president of Technologies and Operations, Entel.
Arun Bansal, head of Market Area Europe and Latin America, Ericsson, said operators around the world are bolstering their existing networks to deliver higher speeds and lower latency to their subscribers to meet increase in mobile traffic volumes.
Ericsson will also deliver several strategic core network projects intended to upgrade Entel’s voice and data networks to the latest generation in order to provide new end-user services, enable increased broadband capacity and higher data speeds, enhanced voice quality, optimized latency, and reduced network operation costs.
Among these projects is a fully virtualized network service (VNS) for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) including virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (vIMS), virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) for VoLTE. vIMS, a core network solution, delivers rich real-time communication services for both consumer and business users over any access network and for any device types, including smartphones, tablets, wearables and laptops.
Supported communication services include HD voice (VoLTE), Wi-Fi calling and video calling. The NFV infrastructure solution including Hyperscale Datacenter solution 8000, Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment (ECEE) and Ericsson Cloud Manager (ECM) will be deployed. ECM and Ericsson Network Manager (ENM) will help orchestrate rollout of Entel’s nationwide VoLTE service.
Additionally, Ericsson introduces its Adaptive Network Inventory solution (EAI) which will become an integral part of Entel’s Digital Transformation project.
