With the Small Cell World Summit starting in London today a number of vendors have been trumpeting their small cells credentials – Arqiva with the announcement that it is trialling small cell backhaul technology in the UK, and Radisys reporting that its self organising network solution developed with AirHop and Broadcom is on trial deployment with a number of mobile operators.
The Arqiva trial is being conducted in conjunction with a number of small cell vendors including Intracom, Siklu Communication and CCS – which recently completed a successful trial with China Telecom – in order to validate its small cell RAN managed services proposition. The trial in the city of Southampton is due to finish at the end of this month.
Intracom Telecom Head of Marketing John Tenidis said the trial was a great opportunity for the company to trial its StreetNode small cell antenna product with Arqiva.
“The product was tested in both Point-to-Multipoint and in Point-to-Point configurations,” he said. “This was a worldwide first demonstration in the field of a small cell backhaul radio operating at 2048 QAM modulation providing almost 1Gbps capacity.”
Arqiva not only has exclusive rights to provide outdoor wireless connectivity in Southampton but also in a number of London boroughs and in Manchester city centre.
The Radisys-AirHop-Broadcom combination integrates AirHop’s SON software with Radisys’ small cell software and Broadcom’s silcon, and answers the wishes of mobile operators looking for a third-party SON solution to enable their small cell deployments, according to Radisys general manager for software and solutions Todd Mersch.
“By integrating our TotaleNodeB small cell software with AirHop’s eSON software and Broadcom silicon, we’re enabling operators to broadly deploy various types of small cells, from residential to urban, at an accelerated pace. We’re excited to see trial deployments already underway,” he said.
According to Radisys the benefits include: reduced opex via automatic discovery, self-configuration and other OSS level SON functions; support for distributed, real-time inter-cell coordination; real-time coordination among multiple cells coupled with interference management and load balancing algorithms; improved system capacity via intelligent radio resource allocation.