eircom Picks Ericsson as Exclusive LTE Vendor

Irish operator eircom has awarded a five-year exclusive agreement under which Ericsson becomes the sole vendor for eircom’s radio access solutions for 4G LTE, as well as 3G and 2G mobile technologies across Ireland.

The deal includes multi-standard radio base station equipment from the Ericsson RBS 6000 base station family for macro and small cell networks, LTE RAN software and upgrades of existing 2G and 3G access network software. Ericsson will also provide support services for the equipment for the duration of the agreement.

Richard Moat, eircom Acting CEO, says, "This agreement supports eircom’s ambition to be at the forefront of the Irish mobile market. By selecting Ericsson, we now have a consistent technology supplier across our entire mobile network to help us seamlessly meet the growing customer demands and expectations for mobile data in the consumer, business and the emerging machine to machine segments.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/141010-irelands-eircom-chooses-ericsson-as-exclusive-lte-vendor_244099435_c

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eircom Rolls Out VDSL2 Vectoring with Huawei

eircom is rolling out VDSL2 vectoring to boost broadband speeds up to 100 Mbps for more than 700,000 homes and businesses across Ireland. The deployment uses technology from Huawei.

By the end of March 2014, vectoring has been deployed to the vast majority of eircom’s 3,000 fibre broadband cabinets. eircom estimates that at least 70% of the approximately 700,000 homes and businesses currently passed by its fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) network will be able to achieve speeds of between 70Mbps and 100Mbps.

Commenting on the development Carolan Lennon, Managing Director eircom Wholesale, said "Leading telecoms analysts such as Analysys Mason estimate that by 2020 European homes and small businesses will need download speeds of 100Mbps. With the deployment of vectoring we’re making those speeds available to homes and businesses within our existing national fibre footprint now, and the 1.4 million homes and businesses we intend to reach by 2016. Once completed, the broadband speeds available over our National Next Generation Fibre Access Network are now faster than most Fixed Line Operators across Europe.

We continue to work closely with our Global vendors, such as Huawei, to explore further hugely exciting technological developments in this area such as G.Fast, which offers the potential of future step changes in both upload and download broadband speeds by driving fibre further out into our network."

http://www.huawei.com

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