Claro Brasil has disclosed plans to deploy a total of 9,000 LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) base transceiver stations (BTS) by the end of the year. CEO Paulo Cesar Teixeira told TeleSintese that the rollout represents the ‘largest mobile investment plan in the company’s history’, although he declined to provide an exact figure for the outlay.
The network – billed as ‘4.5G’ by the operator – was launched in Brasilia in June this year, and utilises 4×4 massive multiple-input, multiple-output (4×4 Massive MIMO) technology alongside 256QAM functionality. The Brasilia LTE-A network reportedly combines 10MHz of 700MHz spectrum with 5MHz of 1800MHz spectrum and 20MHz of 2600MHz spectrum, for a total tri-band carrier aggregation (3C) of 35MHz.