5G Small Cells at Home

Last year, NGMN published a whitepaper on '5G Small Cells at Home'. The whitepaper is available here. The summary on the website states:

The first objective of this white paper is to explore the potential technologies that could help improve the performance of local connectivity at home.

In addition to this, the second objective is to look for solutions of radio resources management at home that would be controlled by the network. The current situation is that the local connectivity is selected by a connectivity manager embedded in the operating system of smartphones that may not have a complete view of what happens, for instance in terms of traffic on cellular networks.

The global objective for operators is then to keep home users connected wirelessly to their local – fixed access network based – connectivity (delivered e.g. by Wi-Fi, a “small cell at home”) with a “premium” quality of service instead of adding pressure on the Radio Access part of the mobile macro network. Challenges for mobile macro networks are for example a lack of (licensed) spectrum that can cover efficiently indoors from outdoor macro network (e.g. low bands spectrum), cost of the radio sites, incl. equipment.

The abstract from the whitepaper as follows:

It is observed that traffic offload - from cellular networks to indoor local Wi-Fi connectivity - takes place when users are at home, but tends to decrease, due to increasing cellular data volumes and due to sometimes better user experience (coverage, throughputs) offered by 4G compared to Wi-Fi 5 (mainly available today at home).

In order to reverse the current trend, this white paper proposes to consider 5G New Radio- Unlicensed (NR-U) technology (that will be part of the future 3GPP Release 16 – Dec. 2019) as a potential (additional) candidate for future small cells deployed at home.

It is expected that small cells at home using NR-U technology will provide – at least – radio performance as good as what Wi-Fi 6 could do, will enable the optimization of the management of radio resources as NR-U could be connected to operators’ core network. Furthermore, the deployment of small cells at home can ensure that the traffic generated at home will be transported via the fixed network, regardless if the Wi-Fi interface of the device is switched on or off.

It's available here.

Related Posts:

• The 3G4G Blog: 5G and Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC)
• The 3G4G Blog: Introduction to 5G ATSSS - Access Traffic Steering, Switching and Splitting
• The 3G4G Blog: Exploring Network Convergence of Mobile, Broadband and Wi-Fi
• Operator Watch Blog: BT's Converged Core to Launch in 2023
• 3G4G Small Cells Blog: Malaysia Looks at Small Cells for 5G
• 3G4G Small Cells Blog: 5G CrowdCell: World's First 5G OpenRAN Small Cell
• 3G4G Small Cells Blog: SK Telecom's In-building 5G NR Repeaters and 'Layer Splitter'

T-Mobile USA's Indoor CellSpot (a.k.a. Femtocells)

Sometime back I saw this tweet by T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray

I don’t care if it’s satire, I’m still going to get a field tech out there 🏃🏻‍♂️ https://t.co/22qpeHfZyS

— Neville (@NevilleRay) January 31, 2019

I started wondering if T-Mo had femtocells and voila!

Pic Source: Dane Powell

According to the T-Mobile website, there are 4 types of devices:

1. 4G LTE CellSpot V1 
2. 4G LTE CellSpot V2 
3. 4G LTE Signal Booster 
4. 4G LTE Signal Booster Duo

The product comparison chart can be seen below

Now let's look at the Functionality comparison chart

As you can see, the cellspots require an ethernet connection as they create a small coverage bubble while the Signal boosters are just repeaters.

You can get detailed specifications here on 4G LTE CellSpot V1 and 4G LTE CellSpot V2.

Detailed specifications here on 4G LTE Signal Booster and 4G LTE Signal Booster Duo.

In Addition, T-Mobile also supports Wi-Fi calling and also sells T-Mobile 'Wi-Fi CellSpot AC1900 Gigabit Router'

Patients to get free Wi-Fi as UK National Health Service (NHS) turns 70

The UK National Health Service (NHS) turned 70 on 5 July 2018. To celebrate this they have also created a dedicated website here.

Back in June, Dean Bubley tweeted about NHS's WiFi Journey from Small Cells World Summit 2018. By December 2018, Full Wi-Fi rollout in secondary care will be completed.

NHS Digital explains the following:

NHS Digital is working to make sure that everyone can access free WiFi in NHS sites in England. NHS WiFi will provide a secure, stable, and reliable WiFi capability, consistent across all NHS settings. It will allow patients and the public to download health apps, browse the internet and access health and care information.

Local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and NHS trusts are responsible for choosing a supplier that can provide an NHS WiFi compliant system which suits their needs, and working with them to implement it across their local NHS sites. The chosen system must be based on a set of policies and guidance defined by NHS Digital.

This is the latest update from David Corbett, NHS WiFi Programme Head

whilst our boss @JulietBauer and the world of NHS IT is at #Expo18NHS the @NHSDigital #nhswifi team are quietly getting on with supporting the rest of the GP estate to go live. Great to see @NHSKernow go live this week and to hear @Daisy_Group making good progress in Humber/Lincs pic.twitter.com/ffdTArEZkt

— David Corbett (@davidcorbett74) September 5, 2018

Make sure to follow David to keep up to date on this subject.

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.

Connecting Cambridge University using Wi-Fi

Came across this post from Airheads about the challenges of connecting the 800-year-old Cambridge University with Wi-Fi. I have spent a lot of time in Cambridge working with Cambridge Wireless and attending fantastic events organised by them so I have seen some of these challenges first hand. To quote from the post:

Providing services to such a prestigious institution is a real privilege but can also be daunting.  At Cambridge, the whole City is the campus as University Departments and Colleges span the City. Networking on such a distributed scale is a challenge; we have to take both the narrow and wider view at the same time. 25 years ago, the University had the foresight to begin deploying a pan-city fibre optic network, the Granta Backbone Network, to connect the hundreds of University buildings together. Today this encompasses 60 km of multicore fibre over which we run a core and distribution router network. Therefore, as all our buildings are networked together, you would think that deploying Wi-Fi on the back of that must be easy. That could not be further from the truth, as hinted at already, Cambridge is far from simple.

The most basic thing you do for a wireless deployment is a Wi-Fi survey. Here at Cambridge, we have a myriad of buildings of all shapes, sizes and types. For example, we have buildings that are eight hundred years old right through to modern structures. The construction of these buildings is amazingly diverse, from metre thick stone walls to concrete monoliths right through to simple buildings made up of modern partition walls. The latter sounds simple until you come across that surprise hefty wall with four layers of unexpected insulation or a signal killing chimney hidden in the wall. We also have constructions as varied as residential buildings, (that can also act as hotels out of term), office blocks, state of the art laboratories, lecture theatres and seminar rooms, libraries and warehouses. This means that the University Wireless Team have their work cut out surveying each of these unique environments while trying to get ubiquitous Wi-Fi into all areas. We estimate that if we surveyed each building end to end, it would take more than five years.

You can read the complete post here. Below is a video that shows some of these challenges.

ZTE's 4G / 5G Street Lights

While we are on the subject of street lights and lamp posts, I thought it may be worth mentioning about ZTE's BluePillar Streetlamp solution that it announced back in 2016:

An integrated streetlamp, charging pillar, base transceiver station (BTS) and smart city information solution, BluePillar enables a traditional streetlamp pillar to double as a 4G/5G BTS, or a charging point for electric vehicles. The solution can also collect local data on weather, environment, transportation and security while its large outdoor LED screen can be used to display information and advertising.

The BluePillar solution consists of ZTE’s BlueBox charging pillar, 4G iMacro base station, intelligent controller and intelligent streetlamp, all fully integrated into one product. It makes full use of a streetlamp pillar and integrates seamlessly into the surrounding environment, which could not only solve the difficulty in siting 4G networks, but also assure Wi-Fi construction, environment monitoring, security management and data collection in hotspots. It also offers direct outdoor advertising opportunities, as well as the display of municipal information and other value-added services at the same time. This solution could reduce the unit cost and promote the business density of each site, which could help operators acquire sites whilst saving land, electricity and other resources. Local governments, operators, everyday citizens and electric car owners all stand to benefit from this solution. For example operators could expand their business scope, and make the transition from traditional telecoms operation to the comprehensive operation of data services in cities.

The innovative integration of the solution, including the BTS, streetlamp and charging pillar, coupled with its ability to charge electric vehicles makes this a convenient solution for telecoms tower companies. ZTE's BluePillar solution could solve the challenges of Internet access on roads and in communities, as well as making streetlamps intelligently connected via information exchanged through its BTS.

Additionally:

Besides street lighting ZTE BluePillar is an integrated part of smart city. The system supports security surveillance, real-time information collection on the environment, real-time monitoring of the assets/special crowd with RFID .Through the LCD, important information and advertisement can be displayed which will bring benefit to the citizens as well as operators. RRU and WIFI equipment can be installed with BluePillar, citizen will be facilitated with WIFI services. Nowadays people have concern about air pollution and prefer clean transportation, such as Electrical Vehicles .However, due to limited space, lack of charging piles becomes an vital factor hinders the popularity of EV. Integrated with AC charging piles, BulePillar solution can save space and be an ideal method for municipal department to spread EV.


According to the ZTE magazine:

ZTE has deployed its IoT solutions in over 140 cities in 40 countries globally. She stated that a wide variety of solutions using smart meters have helped optimise city infrastructure with smart street lighting, parking as well as water and air monitoring Some examples include the deployment of 20 thousand smart street lamps in Paris’ smart city project: the City of Light. These smart street lamps are outfitted with sensors that help manage its energy consumption and maintenance optimisation.

To help alleviate traffic jams in congested cities, ZTE has smart parking solutions that notify users where they can park their vehicle without having to search for hours on end for parking spots. With its smart building and environmental monitoring, building managers would be able to better manage power distribution within the building.

I could not find any information about the 4G / 5G solution being trialed anywhere but I am sure it probably is.

Also, it seems that this Streetlight is developed by another Chinese company called Shanghai Sansi Technology Co.,Ltd. See here. More info also on their Youtube channel here.

Related Posts:

• KDDI to test 5G with base stations built in Street Lights
• Small Cells at Mobile World Congress 2017 (#MWC17)
• Small Cells in the Lamp posts
• Small Cells on the Lamp posts and other street furniture

AeroMobile Equips 100th 3.5G Connected Aircraft powered by ip.access

Picture Source: EX-YU Aviation News

AeroMobile provides connectivity to over 500 planes and 100 of them are now 3.5G connected. This milestone was announced by their parent company Panasonic recently. IP.Access also celebrated their 10 years partnership with AeroMobile recently.

Note that the picture above is from a slightly older technology as it shows support for Edge while the newer technology supports HSDPA. It basically shows how the in-flight connectivity works.

As your mobile is roaming via satellite connectivity, most operators will charge you a premium for the service. From UK, you are looking at 50 pence per text message and £5 per MB, etc. Hopefully someday when the wholesale satellite connectivity costs will come down, you might see more people using this service.

On the other hand, in-flight Wi-Fi is comparably cheaper but not very much. Last week I used Virgin Atlantic to travel to/from USA; the in-flight Wi-Fi costs were:

WiFi light for just £4.99 and you'll have 40MB of data, ideal for those who want to chat to friends, update their social media or spend a little time browsing. If you want to spend more time online, WiFi max for £14.99 includes 150MB of data.

Hopefully in the next few years, these costs will come down.

Small Cells and Free Wi-Fi for 'City of London'

Most people outside the UK will not realise that there is a 'City of London' which is a city inside London city. Anyone interested in learning more can quickly get up to speed by watching this YouTube video. The City of London is also colloquially known as the 'Square Mile'.

The following is from a press release from City of London Corporation (emphasis mine):

The City of London Corporation has announced a deal that will deliver a free, public access WiFi network, offering internet access anywhere within the Square Mile. The multi million pound project is one of the largest investments in wireless infrastructure ever seen in London.

Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Ltd (CTIL) has been awarded a major 15-year contract to roll-out and manage the City of London’s new wireless network in conjunction with O2. The new network will deliver wireless services across all mobile networks for City businesses, residents and visitors.

CTIL will build 4G mobile “small cells”, which will be housed on City street furniture such as lampposts, street signs, buildings and CCTV columns to provide enhanced mobile coverage at street level, and ensure that the City is best placed to become an early adopter of 5G which is widely expected to become available in 2020.

CTIL will partner with O2 in building the WiFi network which will be free for the public to use. The project will replace the current service provided by The Cloud and will be fully operational by Autumn 2017.

The network will be more technically advanced than those found in other leading global financial centres, including New York. State-of-the-art equipment will provide speeds and see users able to enjoy high bandwidth services like video-calling and video on demand over free City WiFi following a one-time only registration.

For those who may not know, there are 4 operators in the UK. Vodafone & O2 jointly own CTIL who provides them the passive infrastructure while EE and Three own MBNL for the same purposes.

This is a very ambitious ask by the City of London. Only time will tell how far they will succeed.

Look back and forecast of Small Cells

Going through 'End of Year Report' by ThinkSmallCell. A good summary of what happened in 2016 and what we can see in 2017. This picture above from the same report is interesting. As you can see that the average speeds of 3G have decreased while that of 4G has increased significantly. I suspect what has happened is that the newer devices with more advanced 3G capabilities now have access to 4G while the older devices with basic HSDPA support have stayed on 3G, decreasing the average speeds.

You can also read the top 5 posts from this blog here.

Coming back to forecasts, another ThinkSmallCell Analyst Spotlight webinar where Caroline Gabriel from Rethink research and Kyung Mun from Mobile experts provide their insight into where small cells are headed in 2017 and beyond.

Personally, I think with VoWiFi becoming common in our devices, the market for residential and enterprise eventually will decrease. I hear you say what about QoS, well see my 3G4G blog post here.

Here are the slides and video from ThinkSmallCell webinar:

Carrier Aggregation (CA) and Dual Carrier (DC) enhancements in Release-13

Recently I posted a summary whitepaper of 3GPP Release-13 by 5G Americas. This article from NTT Docomo technical journal complements that nicely and provides in depth analysis of selected features.

The article (embedded below) focuses on Carrier Aggregation (CA),Dual Carrier (DC) enhancements, LAA and LWA. In this post, I am going to restrict the discussion to CA and DC.

The following is from the magazine article:

Carrier Aggregation (CA):

Up to Release 12 CA, a maximum of 5 LTE carriers called “Component Carriers” (CCs) could be configured for a User Equipment (UE). This enables a maximum 100 MHz bandwidth for data communications, which achieves a theoretical peak data rates of approximately 4 Gbps, assuming eight Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) layers and 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) for downlink, and 1.5 Gbps assuming four MIMO layers and 64QAM for uplink.

In Release 13, the maximum number number of CCs that can be configured for a UE simultaneously was increased to 32 to archive higher data transmission rates with wider bandwidths. This enables a maximum 640-MHz bandwidth for data transmission, achieving peak data rates of approximately 25 Gbps for downlink with 8 MIMO layers and 256QAM, and 9.6 Gbps for uplink with 4 MIMO layers and 64QAM.
...
Release 13 introduced the new function to enable PUCCH configuration for a Secondary Cell (SCell) in addition to the PCell in uplink CA. When CA is performed with this function, CCs are grouped together either with the PCell or SCell with PUCCH (PUCCH-SCell). UE sends UCI for CCs within each group by using the PCell or PUCCHSCell. With this new function, uplink radio resource shortages can be resolved by offloading UCI from macro cell to the small cells while keeping the macro cell as the PCell.

Dual Carrier (DC):

Release 12 designed DC to achieve user throughput comparable with that of CA by aggregating multiple CCs across two eNBs. In release 13, DC was further enhanced with higher uplink throughput and more flexible deployment.

In DC, separate eNBs allocate uplink resources independently for a UE. Hence, Release 13 addresses how to allocate adequate uplink resources on multiple CCs for UE. Typically, eNB calculates the required uplink resources based on the uplink buffer amount reported from UE. In DC, since both eNBs calculate the amount of uplink resources based on the report and allocate them to the UE independently, excess uplink resource allocation over actual amount of remaining data will occur. In particular, with small data packets, if resources are allocated by both eNBs, the UE may send all data to only one of them, and send padding (meaningless bit strings) to the other eNB, which wastes radio resources.

To prevent the excess uplink resource allocation for the small data packets described above, new uplink transmission control methods were introduced. In Release 13 DC, UE buffer status reporting and uplink data transmission are controlled based on the amount of uplink data buffered in the UE.

If the amount of the buffered data is smaller than the threshold configured by the eNB, the UE performs buffer status reporting and uplink data transmission only to one of the eNBs, just like DC in Release 12. In contrast, if the amount of the buffered data is larger than the threshold, the UE transmits to both eNBs. This buffer size-based mechanism solves the uplink resource over-allocation problem since only one eNB is aware of the buffered data and allocates resources when the amount of the buffered data is small.


The paper is embedded as follows:

Related posts:

• Inside 3GPP Release-13 - Whitepaper by 5G Americas
• Dedicated Core Networks (DCN) for different traffic types
• New whitepaper on Narrowband Internet of Things
• LTE-Advanced Pro (a.k.a. 4.5G)

MulteFire: A double-edged sword

MulteFire has been a lot in news recently. ThinkSmallCell published a whitepaper and an interview with Stephan Litjens, Chairman of MulteFire Alliance, outlining its objectives and roadmap. Light Reading held a webinar, which is available here for anyone interested. The overview of the webinar says that the attendees will learn how MulteFire:

• Delivers LTE-like performance with WiFi-like deployment simplicity
• Compares to other LTE technologies operating in unlicensed spectrum
• Coexists harmoniously with other technologies in unlicensed spectrum, including Wi-Fi
• Broadens the LTE ecosystem to existing and new wireless providers
• Provides a neutral host to serve any user

I agree with LTE-LAA and MulteFire and they both have a potential to deliver amazing speeds and capacity for the operators and any service providers who would use it. While it is a great technology enhancement, MulteFire can potentially disrupt the industry as we know today. Let me explain.

Picture courtesy of Keith Parsons

The way every one is seeing MulteFire is that operators can use the freely (or nearly free) 5GHz spectrum that is available. While there are or will be some restrictions, it could be used with low power indoors. The WiFi service providers have been eyeing this spectrum from a log time and 802.11ac is one such standard that makes use of this spectrum.

The end user does not necessarily understand the technology very well. Even though Wi-Fi enhancements are quite good and complex, from an end users perspective, Wi-Fi is free and "why should I have to pay so much for Wi-Fi?" ThinkSmallCell wrote an article on this topic back in January here.

The same consumer will have no issues generally paying for a MulteFire kind of technology as the origin of that is from the cellular world. While I have seen articles suggesting that MulteFire is more efficient than Wi-Fi protocols, I think we can disregard the efficiency angle from this particular post.

My first point here is that end users may be more willing to pay for MulteFire than for Wi-Fi.

The second point is that there is nothing stopping these Wi-Fi service providers from using MulteFire. As that would be a standard out of the box technology, possibly available as small cells, they can use it in conjunction with their Wi-Fi hotspots to provide more 'premium' coverage. Of course they will have to use different parts of spectrum for both these technologies. So here is a possibility of Wi-Fi service providers providing limited mobile services.

Now there is nothing stopping a large Wi-Fi SP to become an MVNO and use 4G/5G for high mobility connections and Wi-Fi / MulteFire for low mobility connections.

This does not just stop here. Many big warehouses and industrial complexes use private LTE networks. In this case they lease the network from a company that may also have chunk of licensed spectrum they bought. In some cases some operators are also providing commercial networks with pico cells / small cells. With MulteFire being widely available, these businesses / warehouses can use out of box small cells with any available devices supporting the technology.

Here there will be disruption with the value of these private licensed spectrum falling to a very low value. These private LTE network providers will have to up their game and compete against new entrants. The focus would change from technology and hardware to services.

There is a possibility of similar kind of disruption happening in testing arena where the only reason some test & measurement companies charge so much is because of technology being niche. Mass availability of small cells in license exempt spectrum may change this equation.

While these are just my thoughts, I am hoping that you would provide your view in the comments so we can have a healthy discussion on this topic.

Small Cells & Wi-Fi in the pavements & roads

Back in October last year, Thinksmallcell reported that Vigin Media in UK is deploying WiFi in pavements.

ISPreview reports that:

Ordinarily most operators prefer to install WiFi access points above ground, not least because it helps the 2.4GHz signal to propagate, but telecoms infrastructure owners like Virgin Media have a lot of manholes around the place that can also be used (makes it easier to tap directly into their core capacity links) and apparently this approach can still cover an area of up to 80 metres.

The use of a submerged rainproof access point, which sits beneath a specially developed resin cover, is certainly a different twist on the usual deployments. Never the less Virgin Media are also using plenty of traditional access points too, which have been discreetly installed on local street furniture.

Wireless antenna maker Kathrein has teamed with Ericsson and Swiss operator Swisscom to develop an in-ground antenna system that will help provide additional wireless coverage in densely populated areas. The technology, called the Kathrein Street Connect, was developed to help operators deploy additional cell sites in places where site acquisition is difficult due to zoning issues.

Kathrein designed the antenna while Ericsson provided the radio. The rugged solution was designed to withstand deploying in streets with heavy vehicle traffic. Currently there are 17 sites piloting the technology in Switzerland with plans for commercial deployment in 2016, said Jim DeKoekkoek, product line manager for antennas and filters at Kathrein, in an interview with FierceInstaller.

Kathrein also has a video on Youtube explaining this:


Its interesting to see that pavements and roads may become the new battleground for providing connectivity through Wi-Fi and Small Cells.


Related Posts:

• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: NTT Docomo's Underground LTE Small Cells with possibility to deploy 5G in future
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Underground Small Cells

The role of Wi-Fi in evolving mobile ecosystem

Came across this old presentation from the Cambridge Wireless FWIC 2015 by Plum consulting. I have written many posts on these topics but this is going to be a hot area for discussion for the coming months and year(s). In fact you might be seeing more on these topics in the next few months on this blog.

Here is the presentation from Plum embedded below.

You can read more about the Cambridge Wireless Future of Wireless international conference in a blog post by ThinkSmallCell here.

Wi-Fi: Future Roadmap and LTE

At the WBA Wi-Fi Global Congress, Intel provided a good summary of the way things are progressing in the WiFi world, including the standards updates that are going on. Luckily I found a video by the same author in from an IEEE conference which is also embedded below.

Wi-Fi is becoming important and a useful rule of thumb is that the spectrum in 5GHz is roughly around 10 times that of 2.4GHz and the spectrum is 60GHz is roughly around 10 times that of 5GHz. (not all spectrum is available everywhere so just use this as a rough guide).


As I mentioned in a presentation I gave this week, there are three different approaches being proposed at the radio level; LTE-U, LAA and LWA. I wrote a post on LWA not long back on the 3G4G blog here.



Dave Wright from Ruckus Wireless has kindly shared a recent presentation on different proposals for LTE operation in unlicensed spectrum. The timeline above shows how quickly things are moving. Here is a the presentation

It would be important from Wi-Fi vendors point of view that LTE-WiFI Link Aggregation is standardised as part of Release-13 as there would be an option which would be agreeable to everyone.

LTE-LAA updates - Jan 2015

There has been quite a few updates on LTE LAA in the past month. First, there is this good video from Ericsson explaining what it is:

The 3GPP chairman recently presented a status update about developments on unlicensed spectrum at an IEEE 802 meeting last month. His presentation is embedded below:

3GPP & unlicensed spectrum from Zahid Ghadialy

IEEE 802 group have their own presentation on the co-existence lessons learned. This is embedded below:

Ericsson has also got a recent presentation on this topic. As can be seen, they expect a solution to be available in 2016-17. Presentation embedded below (download link here)

Finally, if you watched the video by Ericsson, they mention that one of the key milestones of 5G is to be able to combine licensed and unlicensed technology. One of the technologies being proposed in 5G is called Multi-Stream Aggregation (MSA). MSA allows multiple access technologies over licensed and unlicensed bands effectively. The picture above shows how it would work in theory. It may be more difficult in practise though. 

In-Building Options: Facts, fiction, Architecture and Solutions

In-building solutions are still a big topic of discussion. While there are neutral solutions like Wi-Fi will become more common, does it mean that cellular is no longer a necessity? To answer these questions and to make everyone familiar with the options here are a couple of videos of recent webinars.

The first one is from Alcatel-Lucent titled "Fact vs. Fiction – The Debate on In-Building Architecture Options". It discussed the three architectures (as seen in the picture above) DAS, Distributed Radio Systems (DRS) and Small Cell. Here is the video:


The other webinar (actually 2) is from ThinkSmallCell.

"Choosing the right In-Building Cellular Solutions" is a high level webinar that discusses the needs and available solutions. It also shows the decision process in selecting the right solution. The video is embedded at the end of the slides below but can also be seen directly from Youtube here.

The other older webinar and presentation by ThinkSmallCell that goes more in-depth of these In-building solutions has already been covered in an earlier blog post here.

Case study of WLAN and Small Cells by China Unicom

China is a huge and most populated country. Many people do not realise that the number of mobiles in China is more than combined USA and Europe. There are challenges that come along with this huge subscriber base. That is why its not enough to have just cellular connectivity. Small cells and WiFi has a big role to play. A news article last year boldly stated that 'Wi-Fi to be new battleground in China's internet sector'.

According to this article by ThinkSmallCell last year, China Unicom is the second largest operator in China with 251 million subscribers and $21 Billion in revenues. They have only 40MHz available for 4G cellular as compared to 130MHz for the leader China Mobile.

This presentation from Small Cells World Summit 2014 is a good case study of how China Unicom is working on deploying Wi-Fi hotspots and Small cells to meet their customers needs. The complete presentation is below and available from Slideshare.

Progress on WLAN and Small Cellin China Unicom from Zahid Ghadialy

Small Cells and WiFi Forecast 2013 - 2019

We had this last set of forecasts back in February, here is a new one up to 2019/20.

The slides and the video is embedded below but I want to mention few things here. The first being that in the last year (or since the beginning of this year) the main change that has occurred is the availability of Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi), either as native or as an app, has become a commonplace. What this means that some small cells deployments are no longer high priority and has been pushed back.

On the other hand some operators are conscious that small cells can provide a better QoS than WiFi hence they are going ahead with Small cells deployments.

Anyway, Slides and Video as follows:

Please feel free to leave your opinions in the comments below.

'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?

Connectivity in the stadiums

I have recently been observing a lots of discussions around connectivity in the stadiums. I have used this picture above a few times to show different solutions available in different situations. You can see that in theory Wi-Fi, DAS, Micro and Pico would all be suitable for the connectivity in stadiums. In practice this is generally limited to DAS and Wi-Fi.

ThinkSmallCell have recently written an article on the stadium Wi-Fi experience of The Cloud here. Some very interesting choices were taken to keep things simple:

For the main stadium bowl, The Cloud designed for 50% concurrent access for the maximum 30,000 crowd, connecting 80 Wi-Fi access points using 1km of fibre and 9km of CAT6 ethernet cable.

Each access point can handle up to 250 concurrent users. Tightly focussed beams were used to segregate seating blocks, splitting these into distinct coverage sectors.

To simplify the design, the older 802.11b standard wasn't used/supported, VoIP was blocked and a maximum of 3 SSIDs assigned. Unlike a cellular system, there's no handoff as you move around the stadium – you'd need to reconnect and create another session. During peak usage, almost everyone is sitting down rather than moving about (if you ignore those jumping up and down on their seats).

Both Wi-Fi spectrum bands at 2.4GHz and 5GHz were used, with devices capable of the higher frequency prioritised to use it. 56% of clients used the 5GHz band, which has much more spectrum and many more channels available. The different propagation characteristics mean there are different coverage footprints, so planners are actually designing two networks rather than one.

The side lobes on the 5GHz coverage footprint were massive, limiting the number of Wi-Fi access points that could be deployed.

You can read the complete article on the ThinkSmallCell website here.

A question some people often ask is why bother with connectivity in the stadiums. There are many reasons and personally, I would rather have connectivity than don't, even if I am not going to use it.

Real Wireless has done substantial amount of work in this area and a slide from their recent presentation discusses the benefits for various parties very well. You can read their opinion on this topic on their website here.

No discussion on Stadium connectivity would be complete without mentioning the US operator AT&T. They regularly publish statistics and details of connectivity in various sports venues on their website here. A recent report from their new site on DAS connectivity in various stadiums as follows:

• So far this season, there have been 119 pro football games and 214 college football games played across more than 75 different venues where we provide in-venue coverage via Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS). 
• In total, across these 333 games our customers have used more than 104.9 Terabytes of mobile data on our in-venue cellular networks. That’s the same as 104,913 Gigabytes. Or more simply put, it is equivalent to more than 300M social media posts with photos. 
• At this point in the year, pro football fans are edging college fans in average data usage per game by a 342GB to 293GB margin. Or a difference equivalent to about 140K more social media posts with photos per game on average.

Another recent report from the AT&T part in San Francisco where both Wi-Fi and DAS are present as follows:

Here are some of the record-breaking numbers we saw on our venue-specific mobile network at AT&T Park from the Giants’ three home games during the World Series:

• Fans used more than 477GB of data on the AT&T cellular network during the game on 10/25. This is equivalent to more than 1.36M social media post with photos.
  • This marked the highest single game total for cellular data usage at AT&T Park in ballpark history.

• Fans used an average of approximately 447GB of data per game over the weekend on the AT&T cellular network. This is equivalent to more than 1.27M social media post with photos.
  • It’s an increase of approximately 29% in cellular data usage compared to the average game during the League Championship series vs. St. Louis.
  • It’s an increase of approximately 109% in cellular data usage compared to the average game during the final home series of the regular season vs. San Diego (9/25-9/28).
• The peak hour of data usage during three home games was on 10/25 was from 5-6pm PT, the hour in which the first pitch occurred. In this hour more than 83GB of data crossed our venue-specific cellular network.

• On our AT&T Wi-Fi network we saw more than 1,626GB of data move across our network during the game on 10/25.
  • This is the highest single game Wi-Fi total in the history of AT&T Park.
  • 1,626GB is equivalent to more than 4.65M social media post with photos.
  • This showed an increase in Wi-Fi usage of approximately 302% compared to the average game during the 2012 World Series.
  • This showed an increase in Wi-Fi usage of approximately 163% compared to the average 2014 regular season game at AT&T Park.
  • This showed an increase in Wi-Fi usage of approximately 29% compared to the average game of the League Championship series vs. St. Louis.

• The collective data usage equaled approximately 2.1TB of data across both our cellular and Wi-Fi networks at AT&T Park during the game on 10/25.
  • This marked the highest single game total for collective data usage (cellular and Wi-Fi) in AT&T Park history.
  • 2.1TB is equivalent to more than 6M social media post with photos.

Note: All cellular data is specific to only AT&T customers using the DAS network at AT&T Park.

AT&T DAS guru Paula Doublin was one of the most memorable speakers at this year’s HetNet Expo. The company’s AVP for antenna solutions, DAS and small cells did not shy away from questions about AT&T’s budget for heterogeneous networks, nor did she sugar coat the outlook for small cell deployments. A video of her presentation is embedded below and a writeup is available on RCR Wireless website here.




See Also:

• Case Study: Deployment scenarios with DAS, RRH, Small Cells and Wi-Fi
• HetNet Strategies with Oi Brazil