Airspan Small Cells and Macrocells Portfolio, including 5G

Back in April, a presentation from Airspan showed that they have shipped nearly 500k small cells. Sprint has nearly 300k MagicBoxes while Jio has around 120k small cells.

As you can see above, Airspan has a range of outdoor small cells and as shown below, a wide range of indoor small cells.

Airspan recently announced that it has partnered with Rakuten, the newest MNO in Japan, to bring comprehensive 4G and 5G solutions to the world’s first fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network. The announcement said:

Airspan’s Air5G OpenRange28 mmWave platform in 28GHz will deliver ultra-high capacity to Rakuten Mobile with record time-to-market, enabling unprecedented monetization opportunities. Airspan’s open RAN platforms will provide Rakuten Mobile the flexibility to disrupt the economics of traditional network operators and lay the foundation for transformational 5G architectures. With over half a million systems deployed globally, Airspan brings its proven disruptive economics to the fully virtualized Rakuten Mobile network.

Airspan’s mmWave virtualized Air5G OpenRange28 platform utilizes Qualcomm’s FSM100xx 5G chipset and supports open RAN architectures, seamlessly connecting to Rakuten Mobile’s virtualized BBU to deliver the world’s most advanced open interface virtualized RAN solution.  The OpenRange28 mmWave platform supports multiple functional splits for the widest possible set of deployment options, ensuring Rakuten Mobile customers benefit from the highest level of efficiency and the best user experience in Japan.

Airspan's 5G products can be viewed here.

With so many innovators working with Rakuten, it would be interesting to see their 4G & 5G network rollout. Looking forward to some big announcements at MWC next year.

Related Posts:

• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Turkcell's Small Cell Strategy
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Sprint's Trebl: Magic Box + Alexa + HiFi Speakers
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Dense Air: The Neutral Host Small Cell Wholesale Network Operator

Tutorial: An Introduction to Macrocells & Small Cells

I have been meaning to create a video tutorial on Small Cells for a long time. The problem is that its not as easy as most people may think. To explain small cells concepts, its necessary to explain macrocell, C-RAN & DAS. This is what I have attempted to do in this presentation.

The slides are embedded below and can be downloaded from Slideshare. The video is embedded on slideshare presentation but if you prefer, the direct Youtube link is here.

Please note that this video is for guidance only. Many vendors & operators use their own definition which may not agree to mine. In the end, we are all correct 😉

Deployment guidelines for Small Cells and Not So Small Cells

This post is collection of an article and presentation from Omar Masry, Senior Analyst at City and County of San Francisco. The presentation is a good quick summary and the article below gives a more detailed explanation of some of the issues

Wireless (Small Cell) challenges for California Cities & Counties from Omar Masry, AICP

Also read: 10 Key Issues for California Cities & Counties on the Challenges of Small Cells & “Not So Small Cells” by Omar Masry.

'Inside-out' or 'Outside-in'

Going through my old presentations, I came across this prestigious lecture delivered by Dr. Tim Whitley of BT. The main argument of that lecture was, The future of mobile is fixed and the future of fixed is mobile. During the ending of the presentation there is a discussion on Outside-in v/s Inside-out. Lets look at those slides here:

The Future of Mobile is …Fixed from Zahid Ghadialy

Qualcomm is a big fan on Inside-out as can be seen here. Other small cell manufacturers support the inside-out approach too.

The question is, does inside-out approach matters any more. By next year many operators and devices will support VoWiFi in native client. Which means that even if your coverage is poor or non-existant inside, you will still receive voice calls and text messages. Data will continue over WiFi as normal.

An argument in favour of cellular is better/guaranteed QoS as in VoLTE and maybe new services can be available faster but private WiFi best (or no) effort is not bad generally.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

DAS or 'Small Cells' for Indoor Location

There was a recent webinar by Maravedis-Rethink & EJL. The slides are available on Slideshare here. I think there were some good points made about using DAS or Small Cells for the Indoor environment. Here is the youtube clip. You can drag the pointer to the beginning, to listen from the start.

Super Macros and HetNets

The other day I read the following on Light Reading:

UK operator EE wants to turn its existing macro cell sites into "super macros," according to Andy Sutton, the carrier's principal network architect, speaking at the recent Base Station conference in London.

EE 's plan to super size its macro cell sites fits in to a broader Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) strategy for adding capacity and extending coverage. The operator rolled out the first LTE network in the UK last year, and has now covered 55 percent of the UK population and has 1 million 4G customers.

"Super macro is the first step toward building a HetNet,” said Sutton. “Evolving the macro is the most cost-optimized way to adding capacity into our networks."

But what makes a macro super?

According to Sutton, a super macro would typically have multiple radio access technologies (RAT), three-to-six base station sectors, and operate in multiple frequency bands using carrier aggregation techniques. It could be a standalone base station or a hub for subtended, smaller micro cells. He added that infrastructure sharing is vital to the strategy as well.

Once the operator has sufficiently beefed up its macro cell sites, then it can look to smaller cells to be deployed indoors and outdoors in hotspots or cell edge locations. Sutton described a small cell deployment as an "underlay" to the super macro.

The term super macro isn't exactly new, but the fact that operators are talking about it now indicates just how much more they are looking to do with their existing radio access network (RAN) infrastructure before introducing new small cells or while planning a small cell deployment.

"Within the super macro concept, there's quite a lot operators can do to improve performance," says Heavy Reading senior analyst Gabriel Brown.

Along with adding sectors, using more spectrum bands, or employing carrier aggregation, Brown also includes in the super macro concept using 4x4 and 8x8 MIMO, active antenna systems, vertical sectorization, or beamforming.

The advantage of improving macro sites is that many of the basic elements that go into the total cost of ownership of a cell site are already in place, such as power, real estate rental, and backhaul, according to Brown.

I remember the folks from Ericsson mentioning about Super macros but I had not given any thoughts to it. Well, I went back to see what they have been talking about and found this:

Since it was not very clear, I found some additional information from an NGMN presentation as follows: