Claiming a ‘US industry first’, Verizon Wireless, Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies and Federated Wireless have announced the inaugural use of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) Band 48 (3550MHz-3700MHz) spectrum in an LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) carrier aggregation (CA) demonstration. The demo, which took place at an Ericsson lab in Plano, Texas, utilised 2×20MHz LTE carrier channels in the CBRS band, and employed 256 QAM modulation in the downlink.
To date, the CBRS band has been primarily used by the federal government for radar systems. In April 2015 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to add another 100MHz of spectrum in the 3.5GHz band to the 50MHz in that range that was already available for commercial use.