Ip.access joins LTE small cell race
Femtocell supplier unveils 3G/4G E-100 unit, which targets enterprise and public indoor applications and works with 2G gateway
Published: 17 February, 2012
READ MORE: Infrastructure | Femtocell | LTE
The latest in a flood of small cells targeting the new-style mobile network comes from ip.access, one of the firms which is building on its femtocell roots to move into the heart of the RAN. The UK supplier has announced its first LTE unit, the E-100, which can support 4G and 3G simultaneously.
The product is primarily targeted at enterprise and indoor public access environments such as shopping malls, though the firm has also spoken of plans to expand its family into the outdoor network too. Ip.access recently announced a framework agreement with Telenor, across the Norwegian carrier's 11 territories, to provide small cells for residential, business and public applications and this has the ability to extend to LTE in future.
The E-100 should be in customer labs by the end of this year and in the field in early 2013, says the supplier, timing which should chime with the start of the operators' real world adoption of small base stations to boost capacity of their macrocells and improve coverage at affordable cost.
The new unit runs in four bands (1.9GHz, 1.7GHz, 850MHz and 700MHz) and can also integrate carrier Wi-Fi, increasingly expected to be a requirement as carriers look for better control of their WLan offload and for seamless handoff between their networks - as well as planning for full HetNet in future. Alcatel-Lucent recently announced integrated 3GPP/Wi-Fi support in its core network and, in future, in its lightRadio stripped-down base stations.
Like its UK rival Ubiquisys, ip.access believes operators will look for the capacity and quality benefits of small cells before they move to LTE, hence the importance of dual-mode offerings. While 'metrocells' are set to be an integral part of LTE network design, they can be included in existing 3G deployments to boost capacity. This is an opportunity being eagerly targeted by the makers of residential femtocells, though while some push the benefits of a common architecture to underpin all types of small base stations, ip.access has moved to a new system-on-chip for the E-100, the Freescale QorIQ Qonverge platform.
The E-100 will be integrated into ip.access' nanoConverge solution, unveiled late last year, which enables operators to support 3G small cells from an existing 2G small cell gateway. In future, it will also enable them to add LTE to an existing 3G gateway and network management system.
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