IN-BUILDING CONNECTIVITY - The quality inside
Operators are increasingly turning to picocells to improve network quality and control infrastructure costs says Chris Cox
Operators have been struggling with coverage problems since mobile communications were invented. But massive recent investment in 3G licenses and infrastructure has changed the capex and opex cost equation, affecting the performance of the companies that sell equipment to operators. As this article was being written (in Autumn 2007), for example, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and Motorola made a series of anaemic financial announcements and all three blamed a slowdown in operator infrastructure spending.
While much of the heat is generated by the spiralling cost of implementing 3G, operators are also increasingly cautious about their 2G commitments.
To cope with sustained customer demand for GSM services, operators are looking for ways to keep further investment in additional expensive GSM infrastructure under control. Every operator is actively looking for smarter, more cost-effective methods to upgrade existing networks and yet still deliver additional coverage and capacity to their customers, exactly where it's needed.
Introducing picocells
Many are increasingly turning to picocells. Picocells are very small base stations that deliver a mobile signal in areas of high mobile traffic (such as in offices or busy public locations) or poor network coverage (such as indoors) and use an existing broadband connection for backhaul. They are proving to be very much more cost-effective than the alternative of upgrading the macro network.
Operators originally deployed picocells as a "band aid" for coverage black spots. However, as the technology has matured, operators are increasingly seeing picocells as an important mechanism for improving their macro network capacity and performance. And, perhaps most interestingly, they're beginning to be used in one of the most competitive battlegrounds of all: picocells enable operators to use the promise of great service quality to attract (and win) lucrative business customers from incumbent rivals.
Every network has black spots where coverage is marginal or non-existent. In areas with marginal coverage, service quality inside buildings can drop off sharply, resulting in dropped calls, ‘network busy' signals, slow data rates and poor voice quality.
The first major application of picocells was to address this issue of signal quality in buildings.
For enterprises, coverage in the workplace is a major driver of dissatisfaction with operators - this is a consistent finding in all global regions. And where coverage is an issue, it's the dominant issue and is a key reason for churn (along with price and handset choice). Critically, coverage is often the primary differentiator between operators - and the decisive factor in awarding contracts.
The traditional solution to in-building coverage problems has been the repeater. But today, planners aren't so quick to turn to repeaters to fill black spots or penetrate buildings.
Repeaters are to network planning what the rock was to the caveman. Simple and ubiquitous, but not the most sophisticated solution around. But until picocells arrived, network planners generally accepted that the alternative always looked more expensive and difficult to deploy.
While repeaters extend coverage, they act to drain capacity from the cell in which they operate, Picocells by contrast add both coverage and capacity, as well as the ability to enhance data rates. In addition, repeaters can distort the macro cell, causing interference and handover issues, creating severe radio planning problems. Picocells integrate seamlessly into the macro network.
Repeaters can be difficult and time consuming to install and they're also problematic to manage (they don't offer automated fault reporting for instance). Picocells can install in a few hours and offer integrated fault and performance monitoring.
At the beginning, some operators with difficult coverage challenges shied away from picocells because they felt a little uncomfortable with the need to use IP for backhaul, an unfamiliar protocol for network planners used to more established ways of doing things. As IP has become ubiquitous, however, that resistance has melted away.
Providing good service means always having sufficient capacity available. But avoiding ‘network busy' errors in commercial centres and large cities is becoming more difficult as usage levels increase, driven by competitive voice tariffs and attractive new data services.
Subscribers are spending more time on the network doing new, more bandwidth-intensive things. That may affect the quality of service operators provide to premium customers, like BlackBerry and other PDA users, who expect to be able to access services whenever they want. Providing the right level of capacity is tough in densely populated areas and it's limited by the spectrum available to an operator.
Simply adding new macro cells - even if they're micro base stations - is expensive and time consuming. And public opposition to the introduction of more and more radio masts is increasing around the world as well, even if good sites can be found.
An operator's lack of capacity is not only a churn driver but also a brake on new service uptake.
Picocells offer the possibility of highly targeted deployment, rapid rollout and limited impact on the macro network in terms of interference and the requirement for network planning. Each base station is inexpensive and a single base station controller can handle a hundred base stations.
ip.access undertook some business case research recently (see the Case for Picocells: Operator Business Cases at www.ipaccess.com). In one scenario, where the goal was to offload 60 per cent of the indoor mobile usage of 7000 users over a two square mile area, using picocells was 53 per cent cheaper than upgrading the macro network (each of those users was estimated to use 800 voice minutes each month and 5MB of data per month).
Enterprise market capture
As picocells become more and more ubiquitous as the solution to difficult coverage and capacity challenges, more far-sighted operators are beginning to see how to use the technology to attract and retain lucrative business customers.
In Sweden, for example Spring Mobil is the fourth GSM operator, having won a license in 2003. It aims to replace fixed telephony in the office using nanoGSM and has recruited over 500 enterprise customers replacing fixed lines.
Spring can provide fast, low-cost coverage and capacity where enterprise customers need it most. They can sell more minutes while supporting their best customers with the most modern services. The solution reduces churn and drives traffic from fixed lines to mobile networks.
Picocells are an emerging GSM infrastructure play for many operators. They are being used to help operators:
- Differentiate from commodity networks
- Increase revenues from voice and data
- Offer competitive in-office tariffs
- Decrease churn
Operators have spotted that, with picocells, they can sell new services while improving macro cell performance without the need to over-spend on infrastructure because they change the approach to ‘Pinpoint Provision', adding coverage exactly where needed.
Picocells are a proven, end-to-end solution carrying billions of minutes of traffic every year, in dozens of operators around the world.
The future looks bright for picocells.
Chris Cox is Marketing Manager, ip.access
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