We are still at the beginning of the 4G road – in fact some may argue that we did not even reach 4G… officially. Nevertheless, industry chatter on 5G is here. We at Xona Partners have put our thoughts together on what 5G can look like. We recently published a whitepaper on this topic leveraging… Read More: What Will 5G Be Like? »
Often, the least hyped technologies are the most effective, get the widest adoption, and have the greatest impact. Carrier aggregation is one such technology that I don’t think it received its fair share of attention. LTE did bring a number of new features that were not available in 3G, such as MIMO. But MIMO was… Read More: Carrier Aggregation and the Road to Cognitive Radio and Superwide… »
The evolution of wireless communications has spawned many innovations but the cellular concept where base stations are dispersed to meet coverage and capacity requirements remains constant. This is about to change, sort of, if Cloud Radio Access Network (CRAN) architecture lives up to its vision. What makes CRAN such an interesting development is that it… Read More: The Coming of Cloud RAN »
By Kellie Wong – Cisco Communities – Service Provider Community Manager Firstly, may I say Happy New Year and I hope everyone had a safe and nice Holiday season. 2013 proved to be an eventful year in the Service Provider space with the introduction of the Network Convergence System (NCS) to power the Internet of Everything… Read More: Top 12 Blog Posts of 2013 »
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is the longest post I’ve ever written… Let’s check out how Hong Kong operators address outdoor coverage and capacity with a few snapshots of base stations in Mong Kok and Wan Chai. What comes through is a clear approach favoring high power systems to blast energy… Read More: Site Seeing in Hong Kong! »
When small cells started appearing on the market, DAS was one of their targets. The thought was small cells would make DAS obsolete. After all, small cells are inexpensive and easy to deploy. This did not happen and not likely to happen for many reasons. DAS will be around as will small cells. While both… Read More: Between DAS and Small Cells – A Practical Guide »
The market awaits the arrival of outdoor small cells, but the wait continues. When small cell deployments will happen keeps sliding from one year to the next. I have always thought that some in the industry have been too optimistic on small cells deployment timelines and they have ignored important facts that define the deployment… Read More: What the Future Bodes for Small Cells: An Operator Perspective »
I recently came across a presentation on advanced antenna systems with the statement: “advanced antenna systems for power consumption savings not for capacity.” I was very intrigued for a couple of reasons. The first is how much of a problem is power consumption in wireless networks is. The second is that I recalled a conversation… Read More: Energy Consumption in Wireless Networks: The Big Picture »
Guest post by Faris Alfarhan* Channel dependent scheduling is commonly used in cellular systems. In LTE, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) in the downlink and single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) in the uplink allow scheduling to be performed orthogonally in both the frequency and time domains. Instead of exploiting the frequency diversity of… Read More: An Evaluation of LTE Frequency Selective Scheduling »
If operators are really serious about HetNets, then network operations cannot remain as usual. Deploying hundreds if not thousands of small cells is an operational nightmare that cannot be left to manual processes which is what operators do today. Automation becomes critical – and it has a name in wireless network: self-organizing networks (SON). So… Read More: A Quick Tour of SON Basics »
At a recent GTI event in Japan, Huawei demonstrated 770 Mbps peak throughput in a market trial of LTE-Advanced in 3.5 GHz spectrum. This was achieved with TD-LTE access mode with carrier aggregation. The trial showed 500 Mbps average throughput over multiple sites. Furthermore, Softbank demonstrated the ability to provide 1.2 Gbps peak throughput using… Read More: LTE-Advanced, 3.5 GHz, Small Cells and Neutral Host Services: A… »
The latest round of spectrum auctions in Korea concluded with KT acquiring precious 15 MHz of 1.8 GHz spectrum adjacent to its existing band. The country’s largest operator, SK Telecom acquired 35 MHz in the 1.8 GHz band but has to give up some other spectrum in return. In the meantime, the smallest operator, LG… Read More: Korea Spectrum Auction Unloads More 1800/2600 MHz Spectrum »
Thirteen years ago we were working at Metawave to address the capacity challenge operators were facing (sounds familiar?). Our solution was an adaptive system that automatically adjust the antenna beamwidth to change the coverage area of a given sector according to the traffic load. By changing the antenna patterns, and consequently the coverage footprint, it… Read More: SON Load Balancing and the Success of Disruptive Ideas »
The FCC enacted changes to Part 15 rules for the 60 GHz band (57 – 64 GHz) that will give a boost to different types of data backhaul applications. In a very significant move, the FCC increased the allowed transmitted power for 60 GHz systems deployed in point-to-point configuration outdoors. This will improve the competitiveness… Read More: New FCC Rules Give 60 GHz a Boost »
With more mobile network operators using Wi-Fi to complement their radio access networks, one begs the question: how’s “carrier Wi-Fi” different from the one I have at home? What exactly is “carrier Wi-Fi”? While there is no proper, or exact, definition for carrier Wi-Fi, I think it’s more important to realize that the definition has… Read More: Carrier Wi-Fi: What is it? »