The company announced this week a new compact cell phone antenna system called lightRadio, which incorporates radio technology and base station technology in a single box. The entire system, which can fit on a lamp post, is a fraction of the size of today's cellular equipment. Current cellular networks require massive and power-hungry cell phone towers that house the antennas with a separate base station at the bottom of those towers that control the antennas.
When carriers have needed to add capacity or improve coverage, they've had to deploy these massive cell site towers. Alcatel-Lucent's lightRadio system, which will be ready for carrier trials later this year, allows carriers to deploy new cell sites much faster and less expensively than they have been able to do in the past. It also means that carriers can reduce the electricity used to power the cell phone towers and base stations.
All in all, wireless operators can reduce the cost of deploying and maintaining a new cell site by almost half of what it is today.
That has huge implications for the wireless industry, which is struggling to keep up with demand for more data services from smartphones and tablet PCs. In fact wireless data traffic is expected to increase 26 times between 2010 and 2015 according to Cisco's latest Visual Networking Index Forecast. Cisco conducts the survey every year to track network growth.
"It's clear that the explosion in mobile data will continue," said Wim Sweldens, president of Alcatel-Lucent's wireless division. "The architecture that Alcatel-Lucent is proposing will help avert a potential wireless crisis. If carriers don't move in this architectural direction then the problems we are starting to see today will only get bigger. And growing the networks will not be economically viable."
Wireless carriers have been preparing for traffic increases by adding more capacity to their radio networks as well as their back-haul networks that carry the traffic from the radio towers to the Internet. The wireless industry has been pushing the Federal Communications Commission to make more wireless spectrum available so that they can increase capacity. But getting new spectrum into the market takes time.
One way to add more capacity to the available spectrum is to deploy more cell sites that are smaller in area. Splitting cell sites means that wireless operators can serve more customers or provide more bandwidth to individual customers in each cell site.
Carriers have already begun using a mix of a smaller and smaller cell sites in their networks. For example, femtocells provide personal cell sites that can be in a home or business. The smaller cell sites are connected to a home or office broadband connection to improve wireless indoor coverage.
But splitting cell sites on a macro level in a metropolitan area is a little trickier if the old cell tower and base station architecture is used. Getting new cell towers approved is time consuming. And putting up those towers is expensive. It's also expensive to run these towers, which means long-term this architecture isn't viable.
That's where Alcatel-Lucent says it's lightRadio technology comes in. It would allow wireless operators to deploy smaller cell sites much more quickly and at a much lower cost.
This is where Longboat needs to be headed. Finally the new technology has become available and our community needs to become pro-active in creating an island-wide cell phone solution that serves the entire island and not just a small area at the north end.
Link to more information: http://www.thomson-webcast.net/uk/dispatching/?event_id=8b6ec5993b492ac6c37d5045edf26554&portal_id=cd2e2cfc37c987fa20cd04f5cff6dea4&language=en
This is great, I hope our commis is smart enough to embrace it, but I doubt they are smart enough to "get it."
ReplyDeleteI am told by people in the cell tower industry that the rule of thumb for cell phone carriers to locate on a cell tower is the prospect of $100,000.00 worth of cell phone calls a month per carrier per tower.
ReplyDeleteDoes that seem reasonable on north Longboat in the eight months of off-season? We better be looking at alternatives that are less costly to the cell phone companies if we ever want modern technology on our island. Lucent Light-Radio is the best new technology partly because it is much less expensive than a forty year old tower technology.