'China Mobile' and 'Ericsson' deploy GSM Picocell/Metrocell in Nanning, the capital of China's Guangxi region

While the whole world has been focussing on HSPA+ and LTE small cells, a recent press release from Ericsson told us about GSM based 'City Site' deployed in Nanning. From the press release:

Currently, China’s urban construction is in full swing, and its mobile network coverage is rising. In the increasingly crowded urban environment, however, ensuring the quality of mobile-network coverage has become a problem.

In order to meet this challenge, Ericsson has launched the City Site integrated solution, and successfully applied it to China Mobile’s GSM network in Nanning, Guangxi. The City Site, which has been deployed with the standard RBS6601 base station, has an integrated Omni Antenna, which only covers a small area and is, therefore, easy to deploy. It could also be launched with just access to power and transmission cables.

According to the test of the live network, the City Site has effectively met the capacity and quality needs of network coverage, as well as ensuring excellent user experience.

Metrocells to help cut energy consumption in telco systems upto 90% by 2020

From a recent news article in Rethink Wireless:

Greentouch believes three key changes will make the difference to cellular networks' power hunger and CO2 emissions levels. These are the use of smaller, low power metrocells to add capacity in dense areas; wider infrastructure sharing; and techniques to match power consumption flexibly to the level of usage of the network at any time.

"We need to make resource usage proportional to the amount of traffic the network is handling," said Klein.

Smart antenna technologies will also be vital. Greentouch revealed first results of a key low energy project in 2011, demonstrating proof of concept base stations that use large arrays of up to 1,000 smart antennas to cut power consumption. The trial found that the energy needed to power each one dropped significantly as more were added, without impacting the range or capacity of the cell. The team was using fairly standard MIMO techniques, but harnessing the arrays not to boost capacity, but to reinforce a single transmission, creating a single strong beam from many low power signals.

LTE-A Metrocells to boost the data capacity capabilities in HetNet base stations

From Business Weekly:

A transatlantic technology collaboration between Cambridge Consultants in the UK and Florida-based Airspan Networks is set to enhance speed and capacity over the transformational LTE (long term evolution) platform.

The partners have unveiled an LTE-Advanced metrocell boost for mobile broadband; 4G LTE, is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals.

Cambridge Consultants has collaborated with Airspan, a leading vendor of LTE small cells and broadband wireless products and solutions, to boost the data capacity capabilities of the US company’s heterogenous network (HetNet) base stations.

Deutsche Telekom: Tackling the data deluge with help from customers' Wi-Fi

From a recent ZDNet article:

...Deutsche Telekom putting its foot firmly in the Wi-Fi offload camp, and marks a further signal of Wi-Fi's growing importance to operators who seek alternative ways of managing rampant mobile data traffic.

"The astonishing increase in data traffic calls for network optimisation and expansion, as well as the implementation of new high-speed networks," said Deutsche Telekom spokesman Dirk Wende, citing comments made by outgoing Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann. "The partnership with FON fits perfectly with Telekom's network expansion strategy. Wi-Fi and hotspots can be used to divert heavy data traffic to fixed-line networks and thus reduce the load on mobile networks."

Deutsche Telekom sees Wi-Fi as complementary to its existing services, and certainly has no plans to blanket Germany (a geographically large country) with its own Wi-Fi hotspots.