Spark also selected U.S. company Red Hat as one of its vendors for the 5G SA rollout
New Zealand carrier Spark has selected Ericsson to supply its 5G Core solution to suppor its 5G Standalone (SA) network in the country.
Spark also secured Red Hat as one of its vendors for the 5G SA deployment.
“5G Standalone will unlock capabilities like network slicing, which is one of the most transformative features of the technology. While today our network is tuned to provide the best experience across a variety of devices, network slicing provides the ability to tailor or slice the network and then tune it based on a specific use type. A piece of network could be sliced to serve a mission critical service such as driverless cars for example – which require the network to respond quickly and with ultra-reliability in real time, or a gaming slice could be created to provide the ultimate high speed, low-latency experience for gamers,” said Renee Mateparae, Spark’s network and operations director.
The announcement follows the successful completion of a three-month 5G SA trial in 2022, comprising Ericsson’s dual-mode 5G Core running on Red Hat OpenShift and integrated with Spark’s 5G Fixed Wireless Access Network (FWA) to test enhanced wireless broadband. The trial confirmed and validated the technical capabilities of 5G Standalone technology on Spark’s network, the telco said.
Spark previously said that the terms of the C-band mobile spectrum agreement with the New Zealand Government provide the telco with long-term spectrum management rights to 80 megahertz of 3.5 GHz spectrum from July 1 2023, which will be used in Spark’s ongoing roll out of 5G services. Spark has committed to accelerating deployment of its 5G network aiming to expand 5G connectivity to all towns with a population of more than 1,500 people by the end of June 2026 using the allocated C-band spectrum.
In August 2022, Spark said it completed what it claimed to be the first end-to-end 5G Standalone network trial in the country.
For this trial, Spark created and run two proof-of-concepts to lay the groundwork for 5G Standalone roll out in New Zealand, through a collaboration with Mavenir, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Nokia and Oppo.
Mavenir supplied a 5G Standalone cloud-native core solution, while AWS provided multi access edge computing and 5G cloud solutions. Meanwhile, Nokia and Oppo provided cell site infrastructure and 5G devices respectively.
Spark deployed a Mavenir 5G SA cloud-native core solution on AWS Snowball Edge, which was described by the company as a physically rugged device that provides edge computing and data transfer services. The telco highlighted that this was Mavenir’s first global edge deployment on AWS Snowball Edge.
In September 2021, Nokia had announced that it had been selected by Spark to support its 5G rollout, which will provide 5G coverage to approximately 90% of the population by the end of 2023.
