Showing posts with label Millimeter Waves. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Millimeter Waves. Show all posts

Monday, 8 August 2022

Verizon's Growing Small Cells Footprint

Verizon was in news recently when their CTO, Ed Chan, mentioned that the operator had plans to speed up its small cell buildout starting in 2023. Light Reading quoted in an article:

His comments, made to financial analysts at Wells Fargo, come after the small cell market in the US took a breather during 2021 as big network operators focused on building out their new midband spectrum holdings via bigger, macro cell sites.

"Verizon anticipates small cells activity will ramp in 2023 as activity shifts toward 16t16r deployments from early 8t8r deployments built in 2022," wrote the Wells Fargo analysts of their recent meeting with Chan. Newer 5G radios can generally support more antennas, including 16T16R configurations.

"Chan also referenced that a third party had taken longer to grow scale and expertise to handle the installs Verizon had planned, but that it is reaching a point where a higher mix will trend toward third-party deployments from self deployments today," the analysts added.

Verizon officials did not respond to questions from Light Reading about Chan's meeting with Wells Fargo executives. The meeting is not listed among the operator's recent public investor events.

The small cell news could be important to equipment vendors, ranging from Airspan to Ericsson to CommScope. Jennifer Fritzsche, managing director at investment bank Greenhill & Company, wrote recently that Chan's comments could presage a resurgence in the US small cell market. She speculated that Verizon could turn to third-party small cell providers like Crown Castle and ExteNet Systems.

Small cells are big in the USA but the definition of it has become a bit fuzzy. In the old days it used to be an all-in-one unit but now anything that is deployed with an omnidirectional antenna or anything that is deployed on lamp posts or poles can be considered a small cell. 

Over the last few years we have looked at the small cells pics in the USA (see related posts at the bottom), so here are some of them from Verizon.

Quoting again from the Light Reading article:

Verizon is widely regarded as the leader in small cells in the US. The company has so far deployed 30,000 small cells sites for its millimeter wave (mmWave) 5G network.

"We continue to deploy millimeter wave, which is a key part of our network, providing massive bandwidth in dense urban areas," said Verizon's Rima Qureshi, the operator's chief strategy officer, during a recent Verizon investor event. But company officials haven't provided any specific goals for small cell buildout in 2023 and beyond.

T-Mobile has said that it eventually expects to operate around 40,000 to 50,000 small cells as it completes its big 5G network buildout, while AT&T at one point had planned to operate 40,000 small cells by 2015. But AT&T did not meet its goal, and company officials have remained quiet about small cells since.

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have all been working to deploy their midband 5G spectrum holdings, and that work has shifted their focus away from small cells. Macro cell towers can cover wide geographic areas, while small cells – which typically sit atop street lights and rooftops rather than large cell towers – are primarily viewed as a method to improve capacity rather than coverage.

Which one is your favourite? Let us know if you have more pictures.

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Friday, 9 July 2021

NEC's O-RAN Compliant Massive MIMO Radios


NEC has recently started receiving recognition and the attention is deserves for its massive MIMO radio units and other 5G infrastructure. Back at MWC 2019, they was already showing showing their O-RAN compliant Open RAN radio units (see tweet below)

Just in time for MWC 2021, NEC announced the launch of new radio units (RU) for 5G base stations that are geared for global markets and are scheduled to be available in 2022. Their press release said:

In terms of functionality, the new RUs will be compatible with the n77, n78 and C-Band 3.7GHz frequency band (3.3-4.2GHz), which is globally used as a 5G frequency. In addition, ultra-multi-element antennas utilizing Massive MIMO (*) and digital beamforming for high-precision beams will help to provide high-speed, high-capacity communications between a wider range of terminals. Also, the new RUs will feature higher output and wider bandwidth when compared to conventional products, thereby expanding the communications area and providing high-speed transmission. NEC's proprietary high-density mounting technology, power saving technology, and fanless design will also enable a compact format that is lightweight and power efficient.

The RUs will conform to O-RAN fronthaul interface specifications defined by the O-RAN Alliance and will be compatible with base station equipment from different vendors, making it possible to realize open, flexible and optimized networks according to a wide range of use cases.

At the MWC 2021 Virtual Stand, NEC was boldly showing off their O-RAN Compliant 5G Radio Units. Their product features include:


  • Full Digital Beamforming to Improve Customer Experience: AAS(Active Antenna System) improves the radio quality and realizes stable quality of service by Full Digital Beamforming
  • Sub6GHz Massive MIMO AAS for Macro Cells: Best suited for optimizing coverage and capacity in dense population areas. Can also be utilized as an “in-building” solution by horizontally penetrating the beam into buildings.
  • mmWave Massive MIMO AAS for Small Cells: Designed to be compact and light weight easing installation and expanding site options, and also reducing operational cost with its low power consumption feature.

With so many new hardware players emerging as a result of Open Networks, it remains to be seen if NEC is able to make most of its Massive MIMO leadership.

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Monday, 24 August 2020

Leveraging Streetlights for the Digital Future

If you are a regular reader of this blog then you will know we love lamp posts, street lights and poles. There are quite a few posts whose references you can find at the end of this post.


The mmWave Networks group at Telecom Infra Project (TIP) have recently released a new whitepaper, Leveraging Streetlights for the Digital Future. Street fixtures like lamp posts, light poles, traffic signals and other vertically-oriented assets that provide line of sight to targeted facilities and residential areas were identified as having a huge potential for rapid deployment of high speed future broadband networks (including 5G) in the TIP Playbook for Smart Cities.


This new whitepaper looks at "Deployment of high capacity urban mobile networks and smart city applications converges on assets in the public space, such as streetlights. This study and analysis deepens the understanding of the obstacles to deploying on streetlights today and points to possible pathways to accessing such assets to enable fast and flexible deployments"


Quoting from the whitepaper:

In a Digital Networks Working Group handbook by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (Germany), streetlighting infrastructure has been identified as being very suitable in comparison to other street fixtures.

 Deutsche Telekom initiated a study to explore such fixtures and possible pathways to accessing them. Before tackling any challenges, we wanted to understand what the "landscape of the players' ecosystem" looks like, what drives it, what slows it down or stops it from moving, how it works today, and what may need to change.

 We did this specifically for our German home market, but feel confident that the study results can serve as pointers for the challenges and opportunities this asset poses for many other markets. We also believe the political and legal challenges will be very similar for similar assets apart from streetlights.

 The study set out to describe the rules and regulations of public administration, public economy, and public law to which this infrastructure is subject, as well as to identify challenges, opportunities, and potential for its future design.

 We chose a design thinking approach because we need to understand the players and stakeholders who control this infrastructure. And we wanted to undertake this before assessing what can and should be done with these potential assets to enable comprehensive broadband coverage and smart city development.

The whitepaper is available here.

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Monday, 4 May 2020

Samsung's 5G NR Integrated Radio for mmWave spectrum

At MWC LA last year, Samsung Electronics announced its new 5G New Radio (NR) Access Unit (AU) supporting 28GHz spectrum. This new AU brought together a radio, antenna and digital unit into one compact box, making it according to them, the industry’s first 3GPP compliant integrated radio for mmWave spectrum.


According to Samsung, by integrating these RU-DU technologies with 1,024 antenna elements for mmWave spectrum into one compact box, the new AU can be more easily installed on streetlight poles and building walls, providing operators a faster, simplified way to build out 5G networks.

The AU is also able to deliver an capacity of 10Gbps throughput, enabling operators to deliver higher 5G NR speeds to more users. Additionally, improved cost-efficiency is achieved by eliminating the need for ‘fronthaul’ fiber connections, thanks to the AU’s integration of the digital unit.

This video explains it nicely.



In addition, Samsung recently also announced that it has achieved the industry’s fastest 5G speeds in a lab demonstration that combined 800MHz of mmWave spectrum with MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) technology, running on their AU.


According to their press release:

Using two test mobile devices, the demonstration achieved approximately 4.3Gbps speeds on each, reaching an industry peak speed of 8.5Gbps across both devices. In order to achieve the speed, two key technologies were used: carrier aggregation and MU-MIMO.

 This demonstration highlights the key difference of 5G – its use of mmWave spectrum. The wide bandwidth from mmWave spectrum enables mobile operators to provide multi-gigabit speeds that lower band spectrums are unable to match. With multi-gigabit speeds, users can experience transformational 5G mobile services. Mobile operators will be able to deliver new and rich services such as 8K video streaming, AR remote learning and holistic VR teleconferencing as well as new use cases that are yet to be imagined.


Finally, this Tweet by Samsung Network shows how the AU uses an ultra-quiet convection cooling design that lowers operating costs and environmental noise.

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Monday, 11 March 2013

Would Millimeter Waves be preferred Metrocell backhaul option?


Backhaul was probably the most talked about subject in our Masterclass last month and in the Cambridge Wireless Small Cells SIG event, the month before. I have also recently attended a few webinars in the last couple of months that have been talking about backhaul issues ad options. Having said that in a recent post a survey of operators showed that backhaul is the biggest challenge for Small cell deployment. There are also couple of other interesting posts on the backhaul here and here.

As can be seen in the picture above (from our Masterclass), the Millimeter wave starts from around 30GHz.

A recent article in ElectronicDesign mentioned the following:

Millimeter waves occupy the frequency spectrum from 30 GHz to 300 GHz. They’re found in the spectrum between microwaves (1 GHz to 30 GHz) and infrared (IR) waves, which is sometimes known as extremely high frequency (EHF). The wavelength (λ) is in the 1-mm to 10-mm range. At one time this part of the spectrum was essentially unused simply because few if any electronic components could generate or receive millimeter waves.
All that has changed in the past decade or so. Millimeter waves are now practical and affordable, and they’re finding all sorts of new uses. Best of all, they take the pressure off the lower frequencies and truly expand wireless communications into the outer limits of radio technology (see the table). If we go any higher in frequency, we will be using light. 
Millimeter waves open up more spectrum. Today, the spectrum from dc through microwave (30 GHz) is just about used up. Government agencies worldwide have allocated all of the “good” spectrum. There are spectrum shortages and conflicts. The expansion of cellular services with 4G technologies like LTE depends on the availability of the right sort of spectrum. The problem is that there isn’t enough of it to go around.
As a result, spectrum is like prime real estate—it’s expensive. And the expression “location, location, location” is apt for spectrum. Millimeter waves partially solve the problem by providing more room for expansion. You can take all of the useful spectrum we now use from dc to 30 GHz and drop it into the lower end of the millimeter-wave region and still have 240 GHz left over.

You can read the complete article here that gives lot more details.

Bluwan has an interesting marketing video on the same subject, embedded below:


Small Cell Forum has recently released a whitepaper on Backhaul technologies for Small Cells, available here.

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