December 21, 2016, 08:00 (CET)

• Telstra partners with Ericsson for indoor and outdoor small cell solutions to further enhance 4G coverage and customer experience in rural and urban areas

• Small cells provide a cost effective increase to 3G and LTE network coverage and are a key step in readying Telstra's network for 5G

• Small cell deployments are integral to Ericsson's heterogeneous network strategy

Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) and Telstra have partnered to deploy indoor and outdoor small cells in the Telstra's 4G LTE network, including the Ericsson Radio Dot System and Pico Cell RBS 6402. Adding small cells will help increase coverage and enhance user experience in Telstra's 4G LTE network, enabling Telstra to continue providing a high quality and reliable mobile broadband service to its customers.

Mike Wright, Group Managing Director of Networks in Telstra Operations, says:

"The outdoor small cell deployment and indoor small cell solutions are the latest step in our ongoing strategic partnership with Ericsson. Telstra has already deployed small cells in 50 rural towns across Australia. The result has been greater coverage and improved broadband experience for residents and business in these towns.

"With this new agreement, Telstra can increase the small cell rollout across Australia. In urban areas we are looking forward to delivering better indoor coverage not only for individual customers in office buildings, but also to our enterprise customers in shopping centers and large indoor venues."

Small cells are complementary to macro sites and a great way to solve capacity and coverage problems in hotspots such as busy city squares, commercial streets, railway stations, hotels, shopping malls, offices and airports. Close coordination with the rest of the network is needed to maximize reuse of scarce spectrum and ensure quality of service.

Thomas Norén, Head of Product Area Network Products, Ericsson, says:

"By integrating small cells as part of the macro mobile network, operators can cost-effectively provide improved coverage. Coordinated, embedded small cells improve performance through frequency reuse, increasing both network data capacity and throughput without the need to split the available spectrum. Small cells also provide full-service transparency in the network, ensuring that Voice over LTE, Voice over WiFi and video calls work seamlessly in the network for a consistent user experience."

By leveraging both Ericsson's macro and small cell solutions, Telstra will be able to achieve a highly coordinated elastic radio access network architecture, providing significant additional Carrier Aggregation and Coordinated Multi Point gains.

Consumers expect high performing networks with high connection speeds, great data rates, extensive coverage and seamless availability of their mobile broadband service. Continuing to deliver a consistent, high quality and seamless mobile broadband experience is at the core of any operator's business, especially with ever-increasing traffic growth, driven by data intensive applications such as video streaming or virtual and augmented reality.

The latest Ericsson Mobility Report shows that globally, data traffic per smartphone will grow from 1.9 Gigabytes per month in 2016 to 11 Gigabytes per month in 2022. Achieving subscriber satisfaction will require not only improving network data performance outdoors, but also indoors where about 70 percent of today's data traffic is generated. Complementing macro networks with small cells are a key part of delivering performance requirements.