Brazilian wireless giant TIM Participacoes (TIM Brasil) has extended its long-term relationship with Finnish vendor Nokia, signing a new contract supporting its strategy to upgrade its network to the 4.5G Pro LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) standard. The three-year turnkey agreement covers antennas, power, optimisation services and civil works at around 9,000 sites, and will pave the way for the cellco’s evolution to 5G with the use of Nokia’s AirScale radio platform. AirScale, which runs multiple radio technologies simultaneously on one base transceiver station (BTS), purports to allow ‘virtually unlimited scalability’, meaning it is well-equipped to support both the anticipated demand for the Internet of Things (IoT) and the eventual introduction of 5G technology.
TIM Brasil notes that the new 4.5G platform will augment its existing 1800MHz and 2600MHz LTE networks with 700MHz capacity, via a tri-band carrier aggregation (3C) configuration.