Less than a month after striking a fixed wireless
partnership that will target broadband-needy areas, Dish Network and nTelos
announced Thursday that a tech trial in rural Virginia yielded broadband speeds
in the range of 20 Mbps to 50 Mbps.
The trial, conducted in the Blue Ridge Mountains near
Wanesboro and Afton, Va., used ruggedized outdoor routers with built-in
high-gain antennas to receive the 2.5 GHz Long Term Evolution (LTE) signals.
Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent provided the gear and assisted in the installation,
Dish and nTelos said. nTelos and Dish activated two wireless towers for the
tests.
Dish and fixed wireless broadband service operator nTelos teamed
up in May, agreeing to collaborate on a wireless network designed to serve
primarily underserved markets in nTelos' existing service territory in
Virginia, West Virginia and parts of Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
Ohio and Kentucky. The deal came together about a year after Dish forged a
similar deal with ViaSat to provide a national fixed broadband service called
DishNet. Verizon Communications launched
a fixed-broadband LTE service called HomeFusion more than a year ago in
select markets that offers download speeds of 5 Mbps to 12 Mbps and 2 Mbps to 5
Mbps on the uplink.
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