10 Jun 2021

First call accelerates Nokia and AT&T’s US C-Band rollout

Nokia have announced that they have successfully completed the first call on AT&T’s network through the C-Band spectrum ahead of a full roll-out later this year.

Alongside making the successful first commercial call on a 5G smartphone form factor mobile test device, AT&T has announced it has plans to offer 200 million people across the United States mobile coverage with C-Band by the end of 2023.

C-band sits between the two Wi-Fi bands, which are at 2.4GHz and 5GHz, specifically, in the case of AT&T test, the range from 3.7 to 3.98GHz. For a phone to support US C-band, its hardware must support it and it must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to work on it. The test call was made on a mobile with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G Modem-RF System using the Nokia AirScale baseband and 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) 64T64R C-Band radio.

The test used one of Nokia’s new mMIMO antennas that is designed to operate in the newly available n77 C-Band covering 3700 – 3980Mhz

Nokia recently signed a five-year deal with AT&T to deploy the mobile operator’s C-Band network across the USA and will cover both 5G standalone (SA) networks and non-standalone (NSA) networks, cloud-based implementations and Open RAN products.