Nokia Siemens updates Flexi Base Station for LTE
Published: 6 February, 2009
READ MORE: Nokia | Nokia Siemens Networks | LTE
When Nokia and Siemens pooled their infrastructure arms in 2006, the jewel in the crown was the Finnish side's Flexi Base Station, a modular and software enabled design that supports multiple network technologies. Now the product has been upgraded to support LTE as well as the GSM and W-CDMA families.
The flexible base station story - like ZTE's increasingly high profile software defined radio base station - plays well at a time when operators need to achieve the juggling act of upgrading their network capacity and performance, at the same time as cutting capex and opex costs, even though there are still performance trade-offs. Nokia Siemens is promoting the new Flexi Multiradio product, which will officially debut at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month, as a low risk way that carriers can start the migration to LTE at an early stage. The vendor will clearly have its eyes firmly on the W-CDMA operators that have expressed a desire to introduce LTE as early as 2010, such as T-Mobile International, NTT DoCoMo and possibly parts of Vodafone.
Although the story is less obvious, NSN also says Flexi will suit CDMA carriers - an important target market, which includes Verizon Wireless and its aggressive LTE roadmap, because it has previously been a closed sector to the Finnish-German venture.
The software enabled Flexi range is now in its third generation and its fourth year of existence, and has sold about 120,000 units. Its key selling points are reduced operational costs, low power consumption and environmental friendliness (the compact base stations have no cooling units and consume 800W of power, with 60W output). Nokia and pandas may not usually be associated in our minds, but the Flexi has received the endorsement of the World Wildlife Fund, under its Climate Saver program.
The vendor will start commercial shipments next year, around the time that fully standard products will be emerging for LTE and a few of the would-be early adopters are expected to be installing their first networks (though Verizon and DoCoMo are, perhaps over ambitiously, still saying they will have at least one market live this year). So far, 18 wireless carriers have gone public with LTE plans for the 2010-2012 timescale.
Ericsson, ZTE, Huawei and specialists like Vanu are also active in the software define, multi-access network space, and ZTE has shown a product that includes LTE support as well as the Chinese 3G standards. NSN also had a WiMAX program for Flexi, with which it won a contract to build out a city for Sprint Xohm (now Clearwire) but this has gone rather quiet, and there is speculation that Samsung will take over that project in the US.
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