5G CrowdCell: World's First 5G OpenRAN Small Cell

I explained about Open RAN in a tutorial here. In the recent TIP Summit, there was a lot of discussion of Open RAN. In their presentation, Miguel Marin, Technology Director, AMAP, Vodafone talked about world's first 5G OpenRAN small cell. Known as the crowdcell, it can be seen in the picture below.

I wrote about Crowdcell earlier here. While it was more in an initial stage then, it is already working and under trials in Turkey. The video below shows a demo of crowdcell from TIP Summit 2019



You can learn more about CrowdCell on TIP website here.

This video from Lime Microsystems from last TIP Summit explains the CrowdCell concept.

TIP Summit 2018 from Lime Microsystems on Vimeo.

It should be borne in mind that the TIP website says that CrowdCell is intended for extending indoor coverage. Sprint's / Airspan's MagicBox is solving exactly the same issue. You can read more about that here. The only real difference here is that CrowdCell is based on OpenRAN architecture and principles.

Parallel Wireless has a similar solution for outdoors. You can read more about that here and here.

Related Posts and Articles:

• A quick tutorial on Open RAN, vRAN & White Box RAN
• TIP Summit 2019 Opens the Floodgates for Democratised Telco Infrastructure
• CrowdCell heads for TIP
• Ultimate Guide to the Telecom Infra Project (TIP)
• Small Cells at Mobile World Congress 2017 (#MWC17)
• "Vehicular CrowdCell" or "Vehicular Small Cell" and the 5G plan

MTN sees future in 3G

I blogged about MTN last year after their presentation at Facebook's TIP Summit. This year again, another MTN Group executive, Babak Fouladi, Technology and Information System (Group CTIO) at MTN delivered an insightful talk. I have my summary below with video embedded at the end.

MTN has 223 million subscribers. Out of that only 72 million are data users, the rest are primarily voice users. The problem with that is their monthly spend is very low.

The typical entry and emerging segment customers in rural areas spend 30% of their incomes on food and often have limited access to reliable basic services. Its very tricky to convert these users to use high amount of data or any data at all in many cases.

5 Challenges known as CHASE need to be overcome to reach the volume segment. These are:

• Coverage: Data Coverage is insufficient in rural or low income areas and costly
• Handsets: Limited affordability and access to data enabled devices
• Affordability: Data services are unaffordable in some markets
• Service Bundling: Bundling and selling of data are unnecessarily complex and not regionally relevant
• Education: Lack of digital literacy & awareness of the potential of broadband content

To overcome these challenges, a dual data strategy is needed. Newer technologies, ultra high speed & superior customer experience for high value segment. Ubiquitous low cost data coverage for volume segment.

There are many rural coverage barriers. These practical challenges hinder the rollout. The main being that there is no infrastructure in place, the roads are inaccessible, there is no power, the security is poor, etc.

To solve the challenges due to rural coverage barriers, MTN has defined three solution categories for rural:

1. Rural Site - 50 to 100 km from urban
2. Ultra Rural Site - Very low population densities locations
3. Ultra-ultra Rural Site - Very small remote villages

MTN are already doing field trials with AMN and Huawei. With Huawei, they are using the RuralStar (see earlier post here). Other vendors listed above are working with them in the labs and will be trialed for Ultra and Ultra-ultra rural sites.

Their main motivation for working with Facebook and TIP is to find affordable solutions for Ultra and Ultra-ultra rural locations. There is a large scale trial happening soon in 2 countries, 120 sites in total.

One of the challenges in African market is that the average lifespan of handset is 7 years. What this means is that many people still on 2G today will be migrating to 3G in near future. As a result, 3G will be the most dominant technology in Africa in 2025.

While most operators and vendors are focusing on 4G and 5G, there is still going to be a big market for 2G and 3G in 2025. These users cannot be ignored and the operator that serves them well will eventually be the winner.



Further Reading:

• 2G / 3G Switch Off: A Tale of Two Worlds
• Telefonica, Mayutel, Facebook & Parallel Wireless: Connecting the Unconnected in Peru (#InternetParaTodos)

CrowdCell heads for TIP

Recently I wrote about Facebook's Telecom Infra Project (TIP) here. The following is from a recent announcement coinciding with MWC:

In our existing project groups, there are numerous TIP technologies that are moving from the lab stage to field and production trials. Each trial has operator sponsorship and includes key members of our technology ecosystem. Together, these TIP teams are working to validate technologies, share learnings, and accelerate toward commercialization at scale. Simultaneously, TIP members are contributing designs and specifications for new technologies and building new network tools.

Our TIP community is also growing and expanding in scope to address new challenges. Over the last month, TIP has added three new project groups and subgroups: Crowd Cell, Power and Connectivity, and Disaggregated Cell Site Gateways. At MWC, we are also announcing a new TIP community lab near BT’s Adastral Park campus in the UK and more than €100 million in venture capital funding available for infrastructure-focused startups participating in the TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Center (TEAC) in Germany.

In addition, we are excited to welcome some of TIP’s newest members: China Unicom, Sprint, and Telenor. They join more than 500 companies around the world that are active within TIP.
...

Crowd Cell is a new project group led by Vodafone. Crowd Cell is a concept based on relay architecture to help extend the range of existing cellular networks. Due to its plug-and-play design, Crowd Cell can be a rapid and low-cost small cell solution for traditional 4G networks. This project will focus on creating a Crowd Cell by leveraging generic hardware and open source designs for software to minimize costs through this “one design” flexible platform.
...

I blogged about the CrowdCell concept back in 2016 here. Then there were updates on the CrowdCell at MWC 2017 which I blogged here. This year, as the TIP announcement says, Vodafone is taking the CrowdCell to Telecom Infra Project. The following is from Vodafone's announcement:

Vodafone is developing new technologies designed to enable the cost-effective deployment of base stations in currently unconnected areas of Africa and India. The deployment will be supported by Vodafone’s new Open RAN technology and Facebook’s OpenCellular wireless access platform, which were developed within the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).

Open RAN technology significantly reduces the costs of rolling out networks in rural areas, fundamentally improving the economics of providing data and voice services to millions of unconnected people.  This new approach is expected to reduce the cost of radio network equipment by up to a third.

Vodafone also believes Open RAN technology will jump-start the establishment of an end-to-end industry of software and hardware vendors and integrators that will drive innovation, which is critical for achieving such a complex endeavour.

Picture Source: Michael Thelen

Vodafone has already conducted successful trials in India with two new vendors that have developed bespoke high-power base stations using software-defined radio and general purpose hardware based on Vodafone’s specifications and support. Wider scale trials are planned for later in 2018 where up to 200 sites will be equipped with the new technology. Tests are also currently ongoing in South Africa with TIP´s OpenCellular platform for 2G and 4G services.

This OpenCellular technology is being showcased at Vodafone’s booth at Mobile World Congress 2018.

Vodafone joined the TIP board in November 2017 and is a founding member and co-chair of TIP’s Open RAN project group, which aims to develop fully programmable RAN solutions based on general purpose processing hardware and disaggregated software. TIP is an engineering-focused initiative driven by operators, suppliers, integrators and startups to disaggregate the traditional network deployment approach.

The acceleration and expansion of this collaborative trend – embodied by TIP – will lead to significant change in the telecom industry and provide the ability to connect millions of people in rural communities for the first time.

Other TIP initiatives in which Vodafone is playing a major role include:

• Vodafone is leading a TIP working group to develop a new, open version of CrowdCell. The award-winning CrowdCell technology – developed by Vodafone’s Networks Centre of Excellence in Madrid – makes networks more “localised” to deliver faster download speeds and enhance the network’s reliability. For more information: http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/what/technology-blog/crowdcell.html
• Beyond radio, Vodafone and TIP are working together with Cumulus, Zeetta Networks and the University of Bristol’s High Performance Networks Group on evolving Voyager, the industry’s first white-box transponder and routing solution. Vodafone will demonstrate Voyager’s capabilities in a trial in April.
• Vodafone is also founding a new TIP sub-group within the Open Optical & Packet Transport project group focused on transport on disaggregated cell site gateways. Similar to the gateways in radio, these would reduce the current vendor lock-in that operators face in transport networks. Cell site gateways will be also based on off-the-shelf hardware, open software and interfaces on a technology agnostic platform.

Here is a slide deck that I prepared and shared on 3G4G blog here. The part embedded below starts from Vodafone section.

Small Cells, Macrocells, Backhaul, Infrastructure and other connectivity solutions from #MWC18 from 3G4G

Happy to hear your views on TIP or Vodafone's CrowdCell announcement. Please add them as comments.

Ultimate Guide to the Telecom Infra Project (TIP)

Some of you may have noticed that I am a big fan of Facebook's Telecom Infra Project (a.k.a. TIP). I blogged about the TIP summit in 2016 here, BT/EE Mansoor Hanif's presentation on Airmasts here and MTN Navindran Naidoo's recent presentation here.

Telecom TV has done an excellent Ultimate Guide to the TIP project here. The video from that is embedded below.

MTN: Connecting Rural & Remote Africa

The annual Telco Infra Project (TIP) Summit took place recently in California. As always, there are some great presentations that have all be shared online here.

The video of the presentation is embedded below but the two images above are the main points of discussion from this presentation. The first image shows the challenges and possible approaches to solve them. The second one highlights the important point that the traditional infrastructure costs are just too high to provide connectivity in rural and remote locations.

A slightly surprising point that the speaker, Navindran Naidoo, Executive, Network Planning & Design, MTN Group brought up was that they are still looking to rollout 3G networks. In an earlier post on 3G4G blog, I talked about how the developing nations will ditch 3G in favour of 2G & 4G so this is a bit of a surprise. Even the OpenCellular project is focusing on 2G & 4G as can be seen below.

Steve Song in his blog post here highlights some good points. He points out that not enough 4G devices have reached African markets, VoLTE has still not matured and also operators have 3G spectrum available today or they can re-farm 900MHz.

Anyway, here is the video from Navindran Naidoo, Executive, Network Planning & Design, MTN Group in TIP Summit 2017.