U.S. Cellular, one of the smaller carriers in the country, has teamed up with Nokia to enhance its 5G network. Since Huawei is no longer an option, there are very few choices that US carriers have at their disposal whenever they need to deploy 5G equipment or upgrade new ones.
Nokia and Ericsson would be the most obvious choices, but both offer more expensive services than Huawei did. In any case, U.S. Cellular wants to extend the capabilities of its 5G mmWave network with the addition of 24 GHz and 28 GHz spectrum bands, which are absolutely needed for 5G.
In that regard, Nokia will be deploying its AirScale radio solution to support U.S. Cellular’s customers with 5G and IoT services. The discussion can get very technical going forward, so let’s just summarize and say that U.S. Cellular hopes to start providing 5G services to its customers in 2021.
Nokia will work throughout 2020 on making sure that U.S. Cellular’s 5G network will meet the demand capacity and speed required. Good things are coming to U.S. Cellular customers, just not this year.