Small cells win as ALU kills base stations and even Ericsson succumbs
The traditional base station vendors were caught napping by the move to small cells
Published: 9 February, 2011
The traditional base station vendors were caught napping by the move to small cells. Unlike previous shifts in mobile network design, this one emerged at the consumer end of the spectrum. The disruptive potential of shrinking a base station into a device of the size and cost of a home router seemed clear, but because these femtocells were domestic products, coming from the device ecosystem, the infrastructure suppliers could not conceive of them genuinely finding their way into the outdoor cellular network. So they dismissed the pioneers, like Picochip, ip.Access and Ubiquisys, whose designs promised to bring consumer class economics to the base station. But they were not able to dismiss the operators’ need to support a mobile data explosion – their hunt for a method of adding massive capacity at a cost that could still make crashing data fees profitable. The answer to that conundrum was to bring the base station closer to the user, and to make it ultra-compact and cheap. Not so different from a domestic access point after all. This year’s Mobile World Congress will see the new-style network officially accepted as industry doctrine, with even Ericsson reluctantly converted, and the small cell move out of living rooms and shopping malls to the heart of the carrier system.
All the big name base station makers apart from Ericsson have embraced femtocells indoors, and ever smaller cells outdoors, to some extent. Alcatel-Lucent has been the most aggressive on both fronts, and for the past year has been talking in every conference about the way LTE and LTE-Advanced will be built on tiny heterogeneous cells, requiring ultra-compact base stations and new systems-on-chip of the kind pioneered by Picochip. The arguments were not just to steal some momentum from Ericsson in a wireless infrastructure sector where ALU has been losing ground – they built on a history of research and development, especially at Lucent Bell Labs, of radical approaches to design. Lucent was talking about collapsed networks long before its Alcatel merger, but this week it took its logic a step further, and effectively predicted the death of the base station altogether.
The firm outlined a roadmap that it promises will eventually kill the conventional base station, doing away with masts and centralizing many BTS processing functions in the cloud.
The lightRadio portfolio, codeveloped with Freescale, builds on several key existing trends in network design, such as remote radio heads and software defined radios, and goes a step further, shrinking the antennas and amplifiers and centralizing the baseband processing. According to ALU, it breaks down the base station into its component parts and distributes it through the antenna and a “cloud-like” network. The very compact radio units can be
positioned almost anywhere, without the need for specialist towers.
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