Showing posts with label Convergence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Convergence. Show all posts

Friday, 28 May 2021

Nokia Smart Node Modular 4G/5G Femtocell

We wrote about Nokia's 5G Small Cells late last year and about AirScale indoor Radio (ASiR) Small Cells back in July. Now they have just announced the launch of the Nokia Smart Node, a unique indoor mobile module solution delivering high-quality 4G and 5G indoor mobile coverage for residential and small-medium enterprise use. In simple words, a modular 4G/5G femtocell.

The press release said:

The compact, ‘plug and play’ modular design can be deployed readily in any environment to support evolving consumer applications. It is future-proofed to support 4G now and 5G networks when required and both non-stand-alone and stand-alone 5G applications through a software upgrade. Nokia Smart Node is available from Q4 2021.

Stylish, durable and smart, Nokia Smart Node is a dedicated indoor mobile solution with superior coverage and capacity and can be easily scaled from single to multiple units to meet total indoor coverage requirements. Its high-quality coverage, latency and reliability delivers ubiquitous 5G connectivity for specific use cases such as immersive entertainment. The ‘plug and play’ capabilities also make it easy to set up, which keeps installation costs to a minimum. It can be wall, ceiling or desktop mounted.

Nokia Smart Node supports traffic management by reducing core network load and optimizing macro resource allocation. It delivers uncongested high throughput network performance with existing secure authentication and provides a secure connection and SIM-based authentication to assure the quality required in mobile networks.

Mobile World Live added:

Nokia is marketing the solution to both enterprises and carrier customers. For enterprise customers, the vendor promotes the femto as part of a mobile network that can offer “hack proof” security, without requiring IT managers to understand and install complex security solutions. The Smart Node security solutions include digital certificates, IPSec for encryption with IKEv2, and firewall and tamper alarms.

For network operators, a 5G femto can provide local breakout and reduce operating costs, according to Nokia.  Whereas an outdoor small cell near an enterprise will require power, backhaul and real estate, an indoor solution lets the enterprise itself cover these expenses. The downside, of course, is that indoor solutions typically support just one enterprise customer while outdoor small cells could support several.

More information on Nokia Smart Node Femtocells is available here.

It is worth pointing out that many operators are choosing to phase out their indoor femtocell offerings in favour of Wi-Fi calling (VoWiFi). One such example is Vodafone UK who have announced that their Sure Signal femtocells will be switched off by September 2021. 

In addition, Wireless Wireline Convergence (WWC) in 5G is also expected to make access connectivity independent of the core services by allowing connectivity over Wi-Fi. This will accelerate phasing out of femtocells in future.

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Wednesday, 5 February 2020

5G Small Cells at Home

Last year, NGMN published a whitepaper on '5G Small Cells at Home'. The whitepaper is available here. The summary on the website states:

The first objective of this white paper is to explore the potential technologies that could help improve the performance of local connectivity at home.

In addition to this, the second objective is to look for solutions of radio resources management at home that would be controlled by the network. The current situation is that the local connectivity is selected by a connectivity manager embedded in the operating system of smartphones that may not have a complete view of what happens, for instance in terms of traffic on cellular networks.

The global objective for operators is then to keep home users connected wirelessly to their local – fixed access network based – connectivity (delivered e.g. by Wi-Fi, a “small cell at home”) with a “premium” quality of service instead of adding pressure on the Radio Access part of the mobile macro network. Challenges for mobile macro networks are for example a lack of (licensed) spectrum that can cover efficiently indoors from outdoor macro network (e.g. low bands spectrum), cost of the radio sites, incl. equipment.

The abstract from the whitepaper as follows:

It is observed that traffic offload - from cellular networks to indoor local Wi-Fi connectivity - takes place when users are at home, but tends to decrease, due to increasing cellular data volumes and due to sometimes better user experience (coverage, throughputs) offered by 4G compared to Wi-Fi 5 (mainly available today at home).

In order to reverse the current trend, this white paper proposes to consider 5G New Radio- Unlicensed (NR-U) technology (that will be part of the future 3GPP Release 16 – Dec. 2019) as a potential (additional) candidate for future small cells deployed at home.

It is expected that small cells at home using NR-U technology will provide – at least – radio performance as good as what Wi-Fi 6 could do, will enable the optimization of the management of radio resources as NR-U could be connected to operators’ core network. Furthermore, the deployment of small cells at home can ensure that the traffic generated at home will be transported via the fixed network, regardless if the Wi-Fi interface of the device is switched on or off.

It's available here.

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