5G CrowdCell: World's First 5G OpenRAN Small Cell

I explained about Open RAN in a tutorial here. In the recent TIP Summit, there was a lot of discussion of Open RAN. In their presentation, Miguel Marin, Technology Director, AMAP, Vodafone talked about world's first 5G OpenRAN small cell. Known as the crowdcell, it can be seen in the picture below.

I wrote about Crowdcell earlier here. While it was more in an initial stage then, it is already working and under trials in Turkey. The video below shows a demo of crowdcell from TIP Summit 2019



You can learn more about CrowdCell on TIP website here.

This video from Lime Microsystems from last TIP Summit explains the CrowdCell concept.

TIP Summit 2018 from Lime Microsystems on Vimeo.

It should be borne in mind that the TIP website says that CrowdCell is intended for extending indoor coverage. Sprint's / Airspan's MagicBox is solving exactly the same issue. You can read more about that here. The only real difference here is that CrowdCell is based on OpenRAN architecture and principles.

Parallel Wireless has a similar solution for outdoors. You can read more about that here and here.

Related Posts and Articles:

• A quick tutorial on Open RAN, vRAN & White Box RAN
• TIP Summit 2019 Opens the Floodgates for Democratised Telco Infrastructure
• CrowdCell heads for TIP
• Ultimate Guide to the Telecom Infra Project (TIP)
• Small Cells at Mobile World Congress 2017 (#MWC17)
• "Vehicular CrowdCell" or "Vehicular Small Cell" and the 5G plan