Huawei RuralStar 3.0, successor of RuralStar 2.0 Lite, coming in 2020

At MWC 2019, Huawei announced RuralStar Lite, the successor or RuralStar 2.0. The press release says:

At the Mobile World Congress 2019, Huawei released an innovative rural network solution, RuralStar Lite. This solution is specialized to cost-efficiently bring voice and mobile broadband (MBB) services to rural villages with a population of 500 to 1000 people while keeping the return on investment (ROI) period within three years for operators.

Huawei released the RuralStar solution in an effort to bring mobile connections to these unconnected rural areas. This solution has reached more than 90 networks worldwide, serving to provide mobile access for hundreds of millions of people. For most of them, it's the first time in their lives they have ever enjoyed access to the mobile world thanks to this solution.

Picture source: maxwireless on Twitter

Boasting three significant innovations, RuralStar successfully addresses a number of long-standing issues of network development in rural areas where transmission is difficult to reach, infrastructure is costly to build, the power supply is unstable, and deployment requires a long time to complete. For operators, the ROI period can be within three years for a rural network that covers more than 1000 users. To expand connections to unconnected villages having a population of 500 to 1000 people, Huawei released the RuralStar Lite solution to accommodate the local service characteristics of few connections and small coverage areas.

RuralStar Lite features a power consumption of as low as 200 watts. Fitted with four solar panels, this solution greatly simplifies power supply. It allows all related equipment to be installed on poles with a height of 6 m to 9 m, without the need to install supporting rods and build fences. With these advantages added together, project costs are significantly reduced and the total cost of ownership (TCO) decreases markedly.

RuralStar Lite has so far been successfully deployed in Zambia. The deployment demonstrates that RuralStar Lite is able to extend voice and data services to 500 to 1000 users in a village covering a radius of 1 km to 2 km. In addition, the ROI period is expected to be less than three years for operators.

Interestingly, there isn't much information available on the solution even after all this time. While this is a good solution and has been promoted by operators like MTN, there isn't much information about the specifications either. Looking at the slide from MTN above, RuralStar is being deployed at Rural sites. As the requirement is to deploy GSM, UMTS and LTE, one assumption would be that the RuralStar can handle all of these. Whether this would keep the radio head as it is or not, I am not sure.

The above picture shows an example RuralStar site deployed by MTN. The deployment uses LTE backhaul so works as a relay. The small problem with this is that a Macro site from Huawei is required for this approach to work. Without a Huawei macro, this site would need another backhaul solution.

There are also other vendors looking at the same market like AMN, IP.Access, Airspan, Parallel Wireless, Mavenir, etc.also looking at providing alternative solutions for the same problem.

MTN is also looking at OpenRAN to improve it's rural coverage footprint. In a recent press release, it announced:

MTN is projecting to deploy more than 5,000 sites in rural areas across its 21 operations, bringing 2G, 3G and 4G connectivity to areas that were previously unconnected. In order to realise this goal, MTN will rely on an ecosystem of partners who will bring their expertise to build and maintain the sites, utilising a full turnkey approach.

MTN operations in Uganda and Guinea Conakry are already benefiting from this technology, as MTN has also partnered with the likes of VANU, Parallel Wireless and NuRAN Wireless to deliver the technology.

As one of the foremost members of the Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP), MTN carries out solution testing on all hardware and software elements at its state-of-the-art head office in Johannesburg, South Africa. The TIP initiative aims to define 2G, 3G and 4G RAN solutions based on general-purpose, vendor-neutral hardware and software-defined technology.

By continuing to accelerate innovation through initiatives such as OpenRAN, MTN continues to lead the delivery of a bold new digital world, solidifying its position as a leading mobile operator in the market.

Regardless of the approach, mobile users in Africa will ultimately be the winners!

Related Posts:

• Huawei's RuralStar: Taking the fight to low cost small cell vendors
• MTN sees future in 3G
• Africa Mobile Network and MTN connecting Zambia
• Internet para todos: Telefonica and Parallel Wireless on a mission to connect 100 Million Unconnected
• AMN's Ultra-low cost sites
• Telefonica, Mayutel, Facebook & Parallel Wireless: Connecting the Unconnected in Peru (#InternetParaTodos)

4G LTE Man In The Middle Attacks With A Hacked Small Cells

Here is an interesting talk from recent HITBSecConf by Xiaodong Zou. HITBSecConf or the Hack In The Box Security Conference is an annual must attend event in the calendars of security researchers and professionals around the world. Held annually in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Amsterdam in The Netherlands, HITBSecConf is a platform for the discussion and dissemination of next generation computer security issues.

From the talk narrative:

Femtocells offer a user the ability to have a small base station located within their house or other area. These small base stations provide access to the core telecom network where poor reception from an eNodeB would normally prevent consistent coverage. Femtocells has been standardized in LTE since release 8, and is referred as Home eNodeB, or HeNB. HeNBs are mandated to have an IPsec connection back to a security gateway (SeGW) to protect traffic flowing into and out of a Mobile Network Operator (MNO)’s core network.

If the HeNB is within the physical possession of an attacker, this provides unlimited time to identify a flaw on the HeNB. A compromised HeNB can be used in a manner similar to a rogue base station, but will also provide the attacker access to clear text traffic before it is sent back to the core network. There are more than ten different types of HeNBs deployed in China. Ericsson ENC-nRBS01B40 is one of them – a TD-LTE base station working on band B40.

In this talk, we will cover:

1.) How to root a 4G LTE femtocell.
2.) How to make the femtocell portable.
3.) How to perform man-in-the-middle attack with the femtocell.
4.) Show the prototype of Hacking Box of S1 Interface (HBoS)

Slides and video embedded below:

4G LTE Man in the Middle Attack with a Hacked Femtocell from 3G4G

Related Posts:

• Macrocells, Small Cells & Hetnets Tutorial
• Introduction to 3GPP Security in Mobile Cellular Networks

Small Cells and Neutral Host Networks

Back in January, techUK hosted a conference titled, 'Neutral Host Networks: Vision and Reality'. There were quite a few interesting presentations and they are available freely on their website. Here are some slides I found interesting. 

The first one was from Huawei where they talked about 'Neutral Host Models in 4G & 5G Architecture' and covered the Lampsite neutral hosting in detail. If you don't know about Lampsite, check out this earlier post on Huawei Lampsite 3.0 here.

Duncan Wall, Business Development Director, Arqiva talked about 'The benefits of neutral host networks in urban and rural environments - Progress toward that vision'. There were quite a few details on what Infrastructure could be shared and benefits of sharing, new tower proposition, street trends, etc.

I like the simple site design picture shown above. The shared cabinet can host 4 small cells (from 4 operators) and that can feed the shared antenna on top of the lamp post.

In addition, there are presentations from Real Wireless, LS Telecom, BAI Communications, LS Telecom, Disruptive Analysis & Opencell. All presentations available here.

Related Posts:

• Mobile Network Infrastructure Sharing in Japan over Electric Power Infrastructure
• Quick tutorial on Mobile Network Sharing Options
• A practical use of MOCN in ESN
• What is meant by Infrastructure in a Telecoms Network?

Turkcell's Small Cell Strategy

Turkcell is one of the industry’s leaders in extending the traditional MNO model into new services, illustrated how the business case is strengthened by diversity, with small cell roadmaps which span multiple spectrum bands, form factors, vendors and deployment environments.

During Small Cells World Summit, Turkcell presented their Small cell strategy and case study.

@Turkcell has 3 separate use cases for small cells

VIP/business complaints & retention
General in building / enterprise
Outdoor capacity & coverage enhancement #SmallCellsWorld pic.twitter.com/g8CgsxyfB1

— Dean Bubley (@disruptivedean) May 21, 2019

As the tweet above says, they have 3 separate use cases for small cells:

• VIP/business complaints & retention
• General in building / enterprise
• Outdoor capacity & coverage enhancement

@Turkcell Ali Burak Gocer explaining @AirspanNetworks @nokia @nokianetworks @Huawei femto/small cells kit - working seamlessly with macro network - has radically increased data throughput both indoors & outdoors. Choice is good! @SmallCell_Forum @SmallCells2019 #SmallCellsWorld pic.twitter.com/b8oSD7398l

— Peter Clemons (@PeterClemons11) May 21, 2019

Their strategy is to work with multiple vendors for different use cases. The strategy has clearly paid off as different small cells are working seamlessly with the macrocells indoors and outdoors.

Indoor Femtocell Trials with Airspan and Nokia has significantly improved user experience and throughput indoors.

@Turkcell improving speed and capacity of network using small cells. #SmallCellsWorld #telecom #spectrum #5G @SmallCell_Forum #telecoms #telecomunicaciones #5GNR pic.twitter.com/KK3LaNfM6q

— Roberto Kompany (@RobertoKompany) May 21, 2019

Various deployments with Huawei Micro has been done to improve coverage and capacity outdoors, for voice and data.


Related Posts:

• 3G4G Small Cells Blog: Turkcell Marks a 'First in the World in 5G' with Domestic Drone Technology
• Operator Watch Blog: Turkcell Group in 5 slides

China Telecom's PON based Small Cells backhaul to reduce CapEX and OpEX

GSMA has a network economics case study from China Telecom on their future networks website. This case study focuses on the challenges of CapEX and OpEX of small cell backhaul. For coverage and/or capacity enhancement purpose, small cells will be deployed widely in the future. As the number of small cells deployed increases, larger bandwidth and higher flexibility are required for the backhaul transportation, which consequentially leads to higher CapEX and OpEX. Therefore an economic and practical approach has to be put forwarded and verified.

China Telecommunications (CT) is one of the largest state-owned telecommunication companies in China. With the world’s largest broadband Internet network, Frequency Division Duplex – Long Term Evolution (FDD – LTE) mobile network, China Telecom is capable of providing cross-region, fully integrated information services to global customers through its sound customer service channel system.

In this case study, CT proposes a small cell backhaul based on Passive Optical Network (PON) system, which can reduce at least 80% of the trunk fibre and 50% of associated fibre. As a result making facility room and air-conditioning unnecessary. Therefore the CapEX and OpEx of small cell deployment could be reduced effectively and remarkably.

As networks evolve through 4.5G to 5G with more complexity, network densification and intelligence at the edge, the need will be even greater to optimise transport network architecture within mobile Radio Access Network (RAN) to resolve the challenges of backhaul/fronthaul demand and the corresponding increase in costs (CapEX and OpEX).

Key highlights of the case study:

• Small cell backhaul based on Passive Optical Network (PON) system is proposed, which can reduce at least 80% of the trunk fibre and 50% of associated fibre and facility room and airconditioner are no longer required.
• China Telecom has conducted laboratory and field test in Hubei City and Shanghai with Huawei and ZTE. The test results proved the feasibility with equipment and performance KPI’s satisfied.
• Backhaul based PON could be one of the preferred choices for small cell backhaul transport. 

CT selected seven outdoor sites and one indoor site in Hubei, and eight outdoor sites in Shanghai. All the small cells were linked to EPON (Ethernet Passive Optical Network) equipment, which had been updated (software and hardware) to support frequency and time synchronisation. Detailed information about CBUs (Cellular Backhaul Units) and small cells in CT laboratory can be seen in the picture above and more details are provided in the case study.

The case study is available here.


Chengliang Zhang, Vice President of China Telecom Beijing Research Institute, China talked about "Optical Networking in the Cloud and 5G Era" which is embedded below.

Huawei SkySite: Drone with 5G base station & '5G Book' RRU

One of the announcements from Huawei that seem to have missed most of the articles, magazines & analysts is their SkySite Drone with a 5G Base Station and a RRU called '5G Book'. 

Picture Source: Various, see references at the bottom

While Huawei calls SkySite as a drone with integrated 5G base station, I am assuming that the BBU (or CU in 5G) is located on the ground. The tethering is used for providing power as well as fiber for communication between the CU/DU on the ground as the '5G Book' RRU on the drone.

EE was the pioneer of these tethered drones (called Airmasts initially and E.M.M.A. later) as you can see from this video by ThinkSmallCell here.

The drone is designed for emergency coverage after a site failure due to technical issues or natural disasters like earthquakes or floods. The drone weighs just 7 kgs. Tethering allows the drone to be up for a few days. From my past experience, the limiting factor was the motors on the drone getting hot. It can still remain in air between 2-4 days.

We're currently at @Huawei's pre #MWC19 briefing. please excuse the long distance photography - here's a look at their #drone mounted Book RRU #5G cell which can provide 20-30km2 of coverage while flying at 100 metres. Weighs only 7kg. pic.twitter.com/B1cRJrePu8

— Land Mobile magazine (@Land_Mobile) February 20, 2019

According to Developing Telecoms:

In his introduction, President of Carrier Business Group Ryan Ding focused on the vendor’s growing role as a provider of humanitarian communications solutions by unveiling the new Huawei 5G Skysite. Using a new ‘Book’ radio unit weighing only 7 kilos, 5G Skysite is 40% lighter than the outgoing 4G Skysite. The 5G Skysite antenna is supported 100 meters above ground by a drone and the entire base station can be set up in five minutes, to give between 30-40 square kilometres signal coverage.


References:

• Huawei SkySite: Drohne mit 5G Basisstation - MaxWireless (German)
• Land Mobile Magazine Tweet
• Da Huawei nuove soluzioni per il 5G, anche il drone che si alza in volo per supportare le comunicazioni d'emergenza - hwupgrade.it (Italian)
• Huawei Focus on Emerging markets at MWC19 - Developing Telecoms

Related Posts:

• Drones, More Drones & Droneway
• Drone cells are becoming a reality
• Flying Small Cells are here...
• Turkcell Marks a 'First in the World in 5G' with Domestic Drone Technology
• Macrocells, Small Cells & Hetnets Tutorial

Turkcell Marks a 'First in the World in 5G' with Domestic Drone Technology

Press release from Turkcell (translated from Turkish to English by Google translate):

Turkcell continues to undertake firsts in the scope of its 5G works. Huawei Turkey and Aviation Lapis Technologies R & D engineers working with Turkcell team has now spent on a different solution in drone technology life. In this work, which is a first in the world, Turkcell successfully completed the trial flights of the domestic drone, which is controlled by 5G and capable of transferring 360 degree 4K images to live virtual reality glasses.

Carrying one step further studies in 5G Turkcell, Huawei Turkey R & D center and domestic drone manufacturers Lapis Aviation Technology, in cooperation with Turkey's first experienced live virtual reality experience through 5G technology has scored the indigenous drones. The drone, which successfully completed the test flights, is controlled by 5G. Thanks to this innovative application, which provides real-time high-speed data transfer over 5G technology, Turkcell became the first operator in the world to implement this solution in line with 3GPP standards. This solution, developed by Turkcell with its business partners, eliminates the distance between pilot and drone thanks to low delay connection and 5G coverage.

Turkey's first 3.5 GHz frequency band can be controlled through the 5G technology provided through Turkcell 5G Drone, 360 4K camera in live images still virtual reality to the viewers in different locations through 5G (VR) offers the opportunity to watch the spectacle. Thanks to this solution, which brings a new dimension to drone applications, it is possible to control the oil and gas pipelines in the industrial area and to carry out operations such as the control of the fields in the agricultural sector in a safer, faster and economic way. In addition, thanks to the 360-degree 4K image-forwarding capability, new experiences can be offered to the entertainment industry by providing concerts or other shows to be transmitted to virtual reality glasses.
...

Today, because the drones are controlled via Wi-Fi, the communication distance between the drone and the pilot can be reduced to 500 meters, especially in crowded cities. Thanks to the 5G technology that enables low-delay connection and high-speed data transmission, the Turkcell 5G Drone can be controlled with a high-resolution 4K image without a distance limit. In addition, increasing the number of commercial drones flying at low altitude is also a very important need to manage air traffic. With this technology, which will contribute to the management of air traffic, commercial UAVs and drones will increase their use in many sectors such as transportation, logistics, security, monitoring and media.

Last year we blogged about South Korean operator KT and separately, Japanese operator KDDI doing something similar. See here.

Related Posts:

• Turin will be the first European city with a 'drone ready' 5G network
• Drones, UAVs, LTE & 5G
• Flying Small Cells are here...
• Telefónica's LTE Nano Takes to the Skies
• Drones, More Drones & Droneway

Huawei's RuralStar: Taking the fight to low cost small cell vendors

Last year, Huawei announced their small cell / mini-macro product for rural and urban areas. The following is from their initial announcement:

Huawei’s RuralStar base station can reduce the time to recover the investment to less than five years, compared with more than ten years for traditional rural sites Zhang said. The new site cuts power consumption by 85 per cent and lowers total costs by 70 per cent, the company said.

The vendor is having discussions with a number of operators in Africa and Asia about deploying RuralStar sites. Zhang is optimistic there will be strong demand, but noted the new site won’t represent a large percentage of total base station production.

The Huawei executive said urban areas also face many challenges in deploying base stations including high rental fees, difficulty in finding appropriate sites and slow deployments, which can take at least one month.

To overcome these, Huawei developed PoleStar, which can be installed on lamp posts and a variety of other locations in a matter of hours. Zhang said operators can take advantage of more than 1 billion lamp posts, 10 million bus stops and 10 million phone booths around the world to deploy new base stations more cost effectively.

A PoleStar deployment in Thailand using existing traffic and light posts significantly reduced the site footprint, which led to a 66 per cent cut in rental costs. 

Huawei is taking the fight to low cost small cell vendors with its #RuralStar #PoleStar and #TubeStar solutions. More details on our #SmallCells blog coming soon. #5G pic.twitter.com/Y4qHV20VuG

— 3G4G (@3g4gUK) June 19, 2018

It soon became RuralStar 2.0:

Huawei released RuralStar2.0, an innovative site solution in terms of transmission, infrastructure, base station design, and energy. This solution addresses increasing demands for voice and data services from the unconnected and increases operator ROI for rural network deployment. This solution fulfills the following rural MBB requirements: 2G, 3G, or 4G rural MBB networks providing rates of over 10 Mbit/s at cell edges and cell coverage of 5 km; Extended 2G and 3G coverage at a maximum distance of 60 km from the nearest tower-mounted site, providing voice and data (over 1 Mbit/s at cell edges) services and cell coverage of 5 km.

In terms of transmission, RuralStar2.0 adopts non line of sight (NLOS) wireless backhaul, which eliminates rental costs of transmission equipment and significantly reduces OPEX compared with satellite or microwave transmission. NLOS wireless backhaul supports multi-hop backhaul, which allows for a maximum distance of over 60 km from the donor base station, extending network coverage. In terms of infrastructure, NLOS wireless backhaul switches high-rise towers used in traditional rural networks to low-rise poles, reducing site infrastructure costs by 70%. As for energy, low-power base stations and transmission equipment do not require diesel generators for power generation and require fewer solar panels and batteries, which slashes CAPEX by 70%. Using pure solar energy saves O&M costs, in turn greatly reducing OPEX.

Omnidirectional antennas are used to achieve targeted omnidirectional coverage in a single cell at low cost. For cells with insufficient coverage, innovative 90° high-gain antennas can be used to deploy the butterfly site solution. This solution reduces the number of sectors from three to two, the number of antennas and RRUs by 1/3, and total power consumption by 30% as well as the CAPEX and OPEX compared with traditional sites. For a given population in a target area, RuralStar2.0's innovations in these aspects reduce TCO by more than 50% compared with traditional site solutions.

RuralStar has been commercially deployed in many countries, including Ghana, Thailand, Algeria, and Nigeria. Mobile network coverage boosts local economic development and improves local people's lives.


At MWC, Huawei’s RuralStar solution has won GSMA’s "Best Mobile Innovation for Emerging Markets" award.

In Ghana, local villagers used to climb to rooftops and trees, or even ride a dozen kilometers to find telephone signals. RuralStar has addressed these issues. They can now use WhatsApp to communicate and share pictures at home. Transferring money and recharging call fees through Mobile Money have also become common in daily life.

RuralStar enables three transformations, transforming microwave or satellite transmission in traditional solutions to Relay, substituting simple poles for towers, and enabling a move from diesel generators for power supply to solar power. This shortens the return on investment (ROI) period for mobile communications in remote rural areas. Operators can then lower the threshold of profitability by 50%, which is a great help for emerging markets to bridge the digital divide.

There is also a user experience story from Ghana on a village that was transformed with the help of connectivity:

Over the past week, Afryea's friends were receiving more and more messages from her over WhatsApp - and all thanks to the installation of an amazing “wooden pole”.

Afryea is a teacher in a village located in a rural region of Ghana. Having had the privilege of studying in cities, Afryea is used to using WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram. However, she explains that it took her an inordinate amount of time to readjust to the life without these Apps after she returned to this village, as it rarely has any signal.

Afryea is now delighted to deliver the news to her friends that mobile services are becoming increasingly accessible for a surprisingly long list of devices in her village.

Nyakpoo, the village chief, explained to Afryea why people simply couldn't access the network: the nearest base station was more than 20 kilometers from here, so achieving signal reception was no easy task. Before the “wooden pole” base station was installed, the village chief himself often needed to ride his motorcycle a few miles to get closer to a base station in order to use Mobile Money.  "Since our village suffered from a lack of electricity and fibre optic cables, there was simply no other way to build a base station. I am amazed that all these issues can be solved with a simple piece of wood."
...

The RuralStar solution changes this. The solution uses a Relay based on 4G technology to realise data transmission, rather than expensive satellite or microwave. Relay transmission does not have the same line of sight (LOS) constraints, allowing a base station to be constructed on a simple wooden telegraph pole instead of a 30m dedicated tower. With low power consumption, RuralStar can be powered just by using six solar panels.

Afryea’s village was chosen as one of the first to implement RuralStar. The wooden pole to accommodate the base station is prepared locally in the village. The base station deployment was completed in just one week, with total costs reduced by around 70%, and the pole is now helping to deliver mobile services. Even with such a small population, the operator can expect to recoup the investment in just three years.


While I commend Huawei for developing a low cost solution for rural deployment, they are competing with several other small cell vendors competing for the same chunk of the market. It is also often of interest to the mobile operators to bring new vendors in rural areas where the requirement to meet KPIs is much lower. This way they can make sure that all the interfaces from their existing vendors are open and standards compliant too.

Finally, I have to mention that while the articles talks about power reduction, it is compared to the Huawei's macro products. Other small cell vendors may have even lower power and different innovations which may make them attractive for other scenarios.

Finally, Nokia has a similar solution for rural deployments. I blogged about the Nokia Kuha here.

Further Reading:

• Macrocells, Small Cells & Hetnets Tutorial

CW Seminar on DAS vs Small Cells

I mentioned about the CW seminar in my earlier post here. The event is over so here are a few takeaways from the seminar.

The good news about CW Small Cells events is that David Chambers (ThinkSmallCell) does a very comprehensive summary. For this one, its available here.

For a limited time (for non-members), the presentations from the speakers is available on CW website here.

I wanted to highlight few takeaways and stats that were quoted during the seminar as follows:

• The 5 challenges of deploying small cells: compelling event, capacity, complexity, coverage, cost
• 90 operators now offer unlimited service with voice, SMS & Data
• Due to European roaming charges having been scrapped, there is 300% growth in European roaming traffic since last year.
• Average consumption is 1.9Gbytes/month forecast to be 15.8Gbytes by 2022. Finish operator Elisa is already running at an average of 18GB/month
• Modern inbuilding systems are 2T2R with many older installation still using SISO.
• 40% of the workforce will be freelancers, temps, independent contractors and solopreneurs by 2020 (Not sure if this is UK or worldwide figure)
• 39% of millenials say they interact more with their smartphones than they do with theur significant others, parents, friends, children or co-workers
• By the end of 2017, around 14000 co-working spaces will be in operation worldwide
• 67% of people around the world use a personal device at work to some degree

I have highlighted Opencell's view on DAS vs Small Cells in the earlier post here. This Tweet below also shows the comparison points

Good comparison between DAS & Small Cells by Graham Payne of @youvegotnetwork at @cambwireless #CWSmallCell pic.twitter.com/wE8MChjPSB

— Parallel Wireless (@Parallel_tw) December 7, 2017

Bob Slorach, from Wireless Infrastructure Group (WIG), drew some clear guidelines about building size, pointing to the needs of buildings between about 50000 to 300000 sq. ft. This represents a huge unmet demand of around 2 Billion sq. ft. in the UK alone.

As can be seen in the picture above, picocells can serve smaller venues while a 5 watt small cell (microcell) with distributed RF can satisfy the 100 - 300K sq. ft. venues. For bigger venues, a higher power unit would be required. It would also justify to have a neutral host solution so the costs could be distributed and coverage is available for everyone.

Adis Omeragic, Special Projects Manager at EE, shared his side of the story. While his slides are still not on the site (they are expected to be available), I have emnedded a tweet below.

Some very clear and concise points made by Adis Omeragic of @EE regarding DAS and Small Cells at @cambwireless #CWSmallCell pic.twitter.com/wNTlmbPNol

— Parallel Wireless (@Parallel_tw) December 7, 2017

Some of the points he made were, while passive DAS may no longer be used, active DAS will be around. Only about 5% of DAS deployments in the UK have all four operators connected as of today.

According to Adis, DAS displacement is slow because of lack of roadmap alignment between macros and small cells. Small cells upgrade path is very limited. DAS allows Carrier Aggregation, Multi-technology and multi-band capability, SON features which are more common in macros, etc.

Due to the new features like 4x4 MIMO and even Massive MIMO, things may start going in favour of small cells.

One final point that was discussed in the panel was whether VoWiFi is good enough so there is no longer a need for residential or enterprise femtocells.

While the panelists agreed that VoWifi is good enough for residential, it may not be good enough for enterprises. I disagree. If the enterprise has designed their WiFi networks properly, this may not be much of an issue.

There is other issue of the lack of devices and operators support for VoWiFi. As EE pointed out, they only support it for post-paid customers, on direct contract with them. So pre-paid, MVNO and partner customers wont benefit. Also, its supported in limited number of devices.

Huawei Lampsite 3.0

Huawei Lampsite post has been the most popular post on this blog. Hence its about time I add more up to date info on this product.

According to this ThinkSmallCell post:

Huawei, which has already seen a lot of success with its Lampsite 2.0 product, announced a version 3.0 at MWC this year. It was already possible to separately associate the independent radios at each radio head with a different network operator, using the same physical equipment to serve two operators. But the limitation had been that the operator had already approved and installed Huawei as one of their existing RAN vendors.

One of the big differences with Lampsite 3.0 is that it can also accept RF inputs from external basestations, so you could connect an Ericsson or Nokia (or third party Small Cell). Each RF node is capable of sharing up to 240MHz of RF bandwidth across up to four bands, easily catering for multi-operator, multi-mode and multi-band.

According to Huawei's pres release for MWC 2017:

Huawei launched its next-generation indoor mobile broadband solution, LampSite 3.0, at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. This award-winning solution comes complete with a suite of groundbreaking features that drive digital transformation and more fully enable the indoor digital economy, including support for on-demand concurrence of multi-band, more flexible multi-carrier aggregation, distributed MIMO, and 256 QAM.

In the past three years, LampSite 1.0 and 2.0 have seen large-scale global deployment. With the development of 4G networks, more and more stadiums, transportation hubs, shopping malls, and exhibition halls have leveraged these solutions to make huge improvements in their indoor networks. Success stories are everywhere. The Beijing Capital Airport deployed more than 2,200 LampSites in three months, and within 24 months after deployment, mobile traffic grew by a factor of 67. In the Dubai Mall, the largest shopping mall in the world, LampSite enables per-user downlink speeds over 90Mbps, a record only broke by Singapore Marina Bay Sands Hotel, which uses LTE carrier aggregation technology to reach speeds of 251Mbps.

Additionally, LampSite was chosen by Fira Gran in MWC 2016 to upgrade its DAS network in Hall 1, Hall 3 and Hall 6. Even at peak times, attendees can stream and share HD video without a second's lag. Global carriers around the world have chosen LampSite to maximize their indoor broadband performance.

From LampSite 1.0 and 2.0, to today's 3.0, Huawei has set three key initiatives in its mission to enable the indoor digital economy, which will also help carriers and enterprises accelerate the pace of their digital transformation:

Build a Better Indoor Experience: With the rapid development of mobile Internet, a variety of new services continue to emerge, such as 4K video, AR and VR. Meanwhile, the demand for better user experience continues to grow. LampSite 3.0 breaks through a series of key RF technology bottlenecks to provide better indoor experience. By supporting multi-band concurrent signals, more flexible multi-carrier aggregation, distributed MIMO, 256 QAM and a host of other innovative technologies, LampSite 3.0 provides a solid user experience with speeds up to 2Gbps. Beyond speed, with dynamic capacity adjustment technology, it can easily cope with growth in traffic demand, enabling one-time deployment and long-term evolution. Compared to DAS, it can reduce cost per bit by 30% to 40%.  

Activate the Industry Ecosystem: In most cases, installation requirements for indoor networks can be strict. Governments and building owners often require one-time deployment, a collective effort between multiple carriers. This places a lot of pressure on carriers to adopt more robust, future-proof solutions. 

For the first time in the industry, LampSite 3.0 provides up to 240MHz full-bandwidth capabilities, which enables indoor digital networks to support multi-carrier sharing scenarios. Effective deployment of shared digital infrastructure like this involves greater collaboration between property owners and different industry players, but it also enables all parties to share in the digital dividends of the indoor economy. For example, this model gives enterprises, building owners and even investors the option to deploy indoor networks themselves, then lease them to operators, creating shared success across the entire industrial ecosystem. Best of all, when four carriers share the network, LampSite 3.0 leads to considerable cost savings, reducing TCO for each carrier by up to 70%.

Enable Business-to-Vertical  (B2V) Opportunities: Powered by an open digital capability platform, the LampSite solution can provide accurate indoor location services. This enables carriers to surpass traditional B2C and B2B service boundaries with an immense range of vertical applications, such as intelligent shopping malls and intelligent airports. In addition to high-precision indoor cellular positioning, LampSite 3.0 enables indoor IoT, big data and other technological innovations, helping open doors to an endless array of B2V fields. 

Many vendors are now pushing for Neutral Host solutions and Huawei is no exception. As I have mentioned in my other post, network sharing will be very important for 5G and many operators are already exploring neutral host solutions.

According to another ThinkSmallCells post:

Huawei Lampsite 3.0 is a distributed radio system which supports four radio heads per remote node, and adds the capability to feed the system from an external basestation (which could be a Nokia or Ericsson), thus making it more like a multi-operator DAS solution. There is also a “Lite” version for individual shops or restaurants.

Small Cells at Mobile World Congress 2017 (#MWC17)

Mobile World Congress was big and busy, as always. There were lots of interesting demos, technologies and much more. While I was only able to look at a few demos, here is my summary of the small cells related info that I managed to see or came across on social media.

Ericsson and Philips have been working together for a while so its no surprise they were showing their new connected street lighting model. You can see this from my picture above.

Disruption at the network edge panel: @sprintnews densifying its network with thousands of small cells #mwc17 pic.twitter.com/daFoMUCz0a

— CCS (@CCS_multipoint) March 1, 2017

Sprint has already mentioned earlier that they will be rolling out more small cells and they were conveying the same message at MWC. Their rival T-Mobile says that they have 1000 small cells right now but will have 5/6000 by the end of the year.

IP Access had a nice booth and it was good to see that their CEO Malcolm Gordon and CTO Nick Johnson both managed to get their message across that 2017 will probably be a big year for Small Cells.

Vodafone introduced the "CrowdCell" concept last year, this year they continued to build on that story. The CrowdCell uses macro for backhaul. I generally refer to this as In-band backhaul (IBBH) and have written about this here. While they have already shown Indoor CrowdCell and In-car CrowdCell before, this year they were showing the Flying CrowdCell. You can see a video of that here (in Spanish) and a non-flying version here. This is slightly similar to the Airmast concept by EE.

Hidden in a corner at the Vodafone booth was a pre-commercial quad band femto by Parallel Wireless. If you look at the form factor, its no different than a single band femto from couple of years back.

Parallel Wireless also had a presence on many of their partners booths (picture above from KMW booth). TMN magazine has a feature on them and I embed their video below.


China Unicom is deploying 500 Radio Dots from Ericsson in Beijing.

Cellnex was showing how their small cells could be used for Smart Cities and Urban deployments. They have recently signed contract with JCDecaux and expects to deploy between 200,000 and 500,000 small cells 🙃

Acceleran was showing small cells on 3.5GHz CBRS band.

The Indian mobile operator Reliance Jio, which recently set a record for fastest 100 million subscribers (in 170 days), will be deploying Airspan small cells. This should be a massive project for Airspan.

Finally, there were quite a few 5G conceptual demo's. The picture above is from Intel stand. Due to 5G not yet defined, people were either using 28GHz or 60GHz. Regardless of what they were demonstrating, they would claim it to be 5G.

Apologies to other vendors I have missed.

There were also some good presentations at the Small Cell Forum networking area. The link for them is below and I will also be sharing some more of them in the coming weeks.

Related links:

• Mobile World Congress 2017 Small Cell Event Report - ThinkSmallCell
• Speaker presentations from MWC - Small Cell Forum
• Look back and forecast of Small Cells
• Flying Small Cells are here...

Small Cells' and 5G - Small Cell Forum Workshop

Small Cell Forum recently held a workshop on the role of small cells' in 5G. Each speaker had 10 minutes to present their view/vision. The presentations are available here and combined PDF embedded below.

Small Cell Forum workshop on 5G

I was having a twitter discussion earlier today as to whether 2G/3G should be switched off to make room for the more efficient 4G/4G+. While I agree with regards to the efficiency of 4G/4G+, there is still plenty of room for existing technologies, including 2G for a long time. 

While 5G is great and as can be seen in the picture above, a very optimistic picture has been painted with regards to LTE/5G.

Small cell forum recently held a workshop on 5G in Rome. Though it doesn't say explicitly, I am assuming the focus was Small Cells and 5G. It wouldn't be surprising as most of mmWave deployments would be comparatively small as compared to macrocells today.

“All of 5G looks a lot like a small cell” - Matt Beal, Vodafone Director of Innovation and Architecture at #SCWS2016 https://t.co/RGSC6aSTLF

— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) August 28, 2016

I like this picture below as it shows that there are practical problems to solve today then worry about the 5G deployments of 2020. Having said that, the mobile community has to start preparing for it now to be ready by early 2020's  

Huawei had another interesting concept of how 5G HetNets will look

Nokia suggested that the lessons learned from Small Cells will help vendors with 5G deployments.

You can see all the presentations available here.

If you found something very interesting, please share in comments.

Small Cells Deployment Stories

I recently got an opportunity to hear about the small cell deployment studies, organised as SCWS pre-conference workshop. The combined slides from the presentation are embedded below and available to download from Small Cell Forum page here.

Summary of Small Cell Forum Champions day

Small Cell forum held its champions day in Rome this month. There were some interesting case studies and presentations (details below). I have embedded some presentations and provided links to others. Interested people, feel free to explore further.

The Small Cell Forum has identified six key work items where they will be focusing their energies. These are:

• Small cells in Enterprise
• License Exempt Spectrum
• HetNet & SON
• Virtualization of small cells
• Multi operator support
• The role of small cells in 5G, IOT & M2M

Spidercloud did a presentation on Enterprise small cells. They were also one of the sponsors for a study by analyst firm iGR that showed strong demand among Enterprises for Managed Services based on Small Cells.

Cisco shared a case study from a university campus deployment where existing WI-FI APs were ‘upgraded’ to add a small cell capability.

Quortus demonstrated the range of architectures possible with virtualized small cell core networks including the on site MEC server supporting small cells across an enterprise and mission critical small cells supporting public safety applications. See presentation below:

iBwave showed how deployment within the enterprise had improved, with a case study which reduced indoor small cell planning down to one site visit.

MVNO TalkTalk outlined their plans to add LTE small cells to their home routers enriching customer experience as well increasing traffic offload from the macro network. The residential 4G small cells use a dedicated 3.3MHz carrier frequency already compatible with existing 4G handsets to provide good coverage indoors and in the surrounding streets.

Nokia demonstrated the importance of 3D thinking when planning small cell HetNets in dense urban indoor and outdoor environments due to building and user topography.

Qualcomm described how their SON technology provides zero touch integration for both the small cells and the macros, optimizing handovers in both directions.

Huawei shared their vision for small cell evolution, incorporating emerging technologies which leverage license exempt spectrum. Their demonstration of LAA mobility with Vodafone notching up 600Mbps peak rates clearly showing the potential of a joined-up approach to spectrum.

Airspan trials with SoftBank demonstrated an early nFAPI implementation working in a virtualized small cell / macro HetNet. The small cells filled in coverage gaps, and their densification increased capacity. Centralised CoMP and eICIC were demonstrated over a pre-standard nFAPI which works over commonly available packet based transport with significantly less stringent performance requirements than required with CPRI based C-RAN.

Huawei's Lampsite

Huawei unveiled its 'Lampsite' for 'Deep Indoor Coverage' back in 2013. This is what they announced then:

LampSite includes a comprehensive set of BBU, RemoteHUB(rHUB) and PicoRRU(pRRU) products along with accompanying transmission solutions. The compact pRRU supports multiple bands and modes and can simultaneously support LTE TDD, LTE FDD, UMTS and GSM. A LampSite indoor coverage network can also be deployed simultaneously with Huawei’s SingleRAN solution. 

Thanks to BBU’s baseband sharing feature, one fiber is used for several cells, saving up to 87% of fiber typically used for indoor deployments. rHUB connects to pRRU by cable, and support power over Ethernet (PoE) to simplify site construction and reduce total deployment costs. 

In an early deployment phase, individual pRRU cells aggregate into one cell to reduce interference. Once the network offloads heavy traffic, the cells are split again and Adaptive SFN is enabled to balance capacity and interference. Huawei iManager system and evaluation tools are then used to accurately monitor and intelligently optimize indoor hotspot traffic.

This innovative solution has not only helped them to win contracts with China Unicom, TDC Denmark and Telenor Norway but according to TMN magazine article, "Huawei is shipping more than 10,000 PRRUs (Pico Remote Radio Units) per month in some countries and regions for its LampSite in-building system, according to Peter Zhou, Huawei's President of Small Cell & WiFi, Wireless Network."

Recently Huawei and Telenor also won an award in the LTE World Summit for "Innovation in HetNet Development". With Huawei’s LampSite, Telenor is able to provide average downlink throughput of 46Mbps at any location in a building and significantly cut costs. Deployment of each pico Remote Radio Unit takes only three hours – from site survey, through installation, commissioning, to going live, ensuring rapid rollout in areas with weak signal penetration.

Based on presentations in different events, looks like Huawei is not complacent with its achievements. It plans to develop the next generation or NG Lampsite to achieve 1Gbps Indoor throughput with whole lot of technologies to help achieve this. Multi-stream Aggregation (MSA) being the key. See my earlier post on MSA on the 3G4G blog here.


Related Posts:

• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Huawei Lampsite 3.0
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Small Cells and Neutral Host Networks
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Huawei SkySite: Drone with 5G base station & '5G Book' RRU