NSN today said its new Flexi Zone base stations offer 30 percent lower overall costs than conventional units. The new upgrade will be announced at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014, Barcelona.
The upgraded Flexi Zone base stations are the industry’s smallest indoor and outdoor micro/pico cells and provide the same capacity and features as macro-cellular base stations.
They also benefit from NSN’s recently announced eICIC that provides 30 percent capacity improvement, said NSN.
Daryl Schoolar, principal analyst, network infrastructure, Ovum, said: “NSN’s focus on software parity between small and macro cells, for example, will make it easier for operators to tightly couple the two network layers and address such concerns as spectrum interference, radio interoperability, and simplification of operations and maintenance.”
Flexi Zone LTE micro/pico base stations now support all the most commonly used frequency bands for FDD LTE and TD-LTE and can be deployed in outdoor and harsh indoor environments such as railway stations or factories.
A new multi-radio outdoor and indoor Flexi Zone picocell base station integrates LTE and Wi-Fi in one unit. Combined with NSN Smart Wi-Fi real-time traffic steering, operators can now take advantage of unlicensed spectrum to further increase site capacity and improve the customer experience at busy locations.
A new indoor Flexi Zone picocell base station for small and medium-sized buildings has optional Wi-Fi and can provide significant performance gain over femto, DAS and hybrid DAS.
Adding Flexi Zone controller functionality turns the picocell into a Flexi Zone access point for almost unlimited capacity to serve large, very large and dense indoor locations. The base station can use a building’s existing shared Ethernet cabling for backhaul, eliminating the cost of new wiring typically needed for DAS and hybrid DAS systems.
“These developments will catalyze the wide adoption of small cells to help operators build capacity and coverage by complementing the macro-cellular network with access points that integrate LTE and Wi-Fi,” said Randy Cox, head of Small Cells product management at NSN.
