Australian telecom Optus has unveiled the first 50 5G sites that will be built by Ericsson over the next few months.
The sites will be built across Sydney and Melbourne, the two most populous areas of the country, as Optus plans to build about 1,200 5G sites across Australia by March of next year. As part of the long-term 5G rollout, Optus will also install 5G sites in the areas of the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia by March.
“We are working closely with Ericsson to conduct critical inter-operability device testing so that we can deliver a compatible 5G home broadband product to customers and open these sites up as part of our expressions of interest campaign,” said Kent Wu, head of network access planning and quality at Optus, in a statement.
In January, Optus announced it was working with Ericsson to deliver both 5G devices for smartphones and 5G home broadband for homeowners.
Ericsson has been accelerating its deployment of 5G equipment worldwide as the technology has started to go live in a handful of countries. The networking company worked with KT to deploy 5G equipment in South Korea earlier this year, as that country was the first to offer any type of 5G services.
At the same time, Ericsson is prepping users and telecoms with what it believes will be the future of 5G, and making a case for what applications will be available in the short-term and what will be available in the future as deployment becomes universal.
