Final federal approval for Initial Commercial Deployment (ICD) of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service is expected to come any day, and Federated Wireless says it has more than 20 customers ready to go.
The CBRS Alliance has scheduled an event for September 18 to celebrate ICD and highlight real-world use cases for LTE in 3.5 GHz CBRS spectrum, which has been branded as OnGo.
Federated Wireless which operates both a Spectrum Access System which ensures proper authorization of the three-tiered, shared spectrum resources to CBRS devices and an Environmental Sensing Capability network to protect incumbent naval radar systems, says that it will start deploying CBRS services to “more than 20 customers in both urban and rural markets across 36 states in the U.S. immediately upon the [Federal Communications Commission’s] public notice of approval.”
The company laid out five commercial uses for CBRS and says it is working with companies in each category. Those include:
-Mobile network operators seeking additional network capacity
-Cable network operators seeking to add LTE to their access point networks
-Wireless internet service providers, which are often using adjacent spectrum and can deploy CBRS with a software upgrade
-Enterprise communications or IoT networks
-Managed service providers seeking to add another wireless network option to their service portfolio
Federated said the cost to deploy CBRS is “on par with Wi-Fi for network and service extensions,” rather than more expensive distributed antenna systems.
The company said in announcing its readiness for ICD that its customers and partners include Verizon, cable company Charter, American Tower, Nokia, Motorola Solutions, Samsung, Ericsson, ExteNet Systems, Airspan, Boingo Wireless, JMA Wireless, Cambium Networks, Cradlepoint, ,Geoverse, JMA Wireless, Landmark Dividend, Telrad, Wave Wireless and Contour Networks.
Federated recently received a $51 million Series C funding boost, drawing on existing investors and adding new ones including SBA Communications.