SK Telecom: Commercial deployment of LTE Femto cell

SK Telecom does not fail to impress with their aggressive roll-outs and impressive solutions to challenging problems. One such presentation from the Small Cells World Summit 2013 in London is embedded as follows:

Commercial deployment of lte femto cell with the innovative technologies and the roadmap from Zahid Ghadialy

Another presentation from late last year is available here.

Satellite Backhaul for Rural Small Cells

 A typical problem with the rural small cells is how to power and backhaul them. Power issue can be solved using Solar cells, wind turbines, etc. and generally a combination of them as a failsafe mechanism but what about the backhaul.

DSL is generally not available and Microwave links maybe difficult to acheive. How about Satellite backhaul?

iDirect have an analysis on the business case of using Satellite for backhaul which is embedded below:

Small Cells and Satellite from Zahid Ghadialy

An Informa report titled "Satellite backhaul for rural small cells" is also available on Slideshare here.

Site Selection - Nice animation by Alcatel-Lucent

See Also:

• The biggest challenge to Small Cells deployment

Interference in 3G Hetnets in case of shared carrier

We had a discussion earlier on 'dedicated v/s shared' carrier here. This post is just re-iterating the fact that while in case of LTE, there are advanced techniques like eICIC to manage interference (see 3G4G blog here), in case of 3G there are no standard techniques to manage the interference in case of shared carrier.

A recent presentation from ZTE in one of the conferences explains this point further that has been reproduced below for reference:

While I think SON can help in certain situations in case of 3G, the chances of coverage black holes are very high which can lead to radio link failures in ongoing calls. As such, the operator has to be absolutely sure where a small cell will be placed in a shared carrier situation for sake of maintaining a good macro coverage. 

Small Cells in LTE - 3GPP Rel-8 to Rel-12

A simple picture showing the Small Cells support in different 3GPP releases. For more details refer to the 3G4G blog here.

AT&T Experience: Small Cells in the office

From a presentation by Gordon Mansfield, in the Small Cells World Summit 2013.

What do the customers think?

“The Metrocell is working very well, we’ve seen significant improvements with data connection and speed which was our biggest issue before installation. Voice also seems to be working well.”

“The individuals within the office have seen a stronger signal and are able to make and receive calls in areas that they couldn’t before.”

“The new system seems to be working – my primary benchmark is whether or not I experience dropped calls …. I am not. In the past I received a voice mail notice but the phone never rang to give me an opportunity to answer it now all calls are coming through.”