Nokia and U.S. Cellular announced an agreement to add 5G mmWave capabilities in the 24 GHz and 28 GHz spectrum bands.
U.S. Cellular will deploy Nokia’s AirScale solutions with Cloud RAN capabilities to provide enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) 5G mmWave.

U.S. Cellular will include the Nokia AirFrame open edge solution for Cloud RAN in the deployments, enabling a virtualized RAN. Benefits to U.S. Cellular will include significant total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction through simplification automation and operation efficiency gains, as well as through the support of open ecosystems.

The company has opted to include Nokia’s Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) solution as a deployment component, which allows the scaling of 5G IoT services faster and more cost-effectively, order to support U.S. Cellular’s IoT and enterprise customers.

U.S. Cellular is beginning its multi-year deployment of 5G mmWave now, with commercial availability planned for 2021.

Mike Irizarry, CTO of U.S. Cellular, said: “With 5G mmWave technology from Nokia, we can provide our customers with the leading-edge capabilities of high performance, ultra-low latency 5G.”

Ericsson and U.S. Cellular in 2019 announced a multi-year deal for Ericsson to support U.S. Cellular’s 5G network deployment. Ericsson provides U.S. Cellular with 3GPP standards-based 5G New Radio (NR) hardware and software.