Ericsson on Friday completed its largest network consolidation project, delivering 12,000 mobile broadband-ready base stations for Three and T-Mobile in the UK.
The vendor has upgraded all 3G sites, transmitters and base stations to offer high speed mobile broadband for MBNL, a joint venture between Three and Everything Everywhere, and claims the network sharing agreement has already had positive environmental benefits through the switch off of the first 2,000 of 5,000 redundant sites.
Everything Everywhere runs T-Mobile’s UK network following the carrier’s merger with Orange earlier this year.
Ericsson said the upgrade is one of the biggest in the world, and was complicated by the need to keep both networks running smoothly during the procedure.
“This was an unparalleled and quite complex managed services and systems integration consolidation project,” Magnus Mandersson, head of Ericsson’s Global Services business unit commented.
“Its success shows the benefits to partners of network sharing and reflects a new business model that the industry can learn a great deal from,” he added.