Small cells were in the spotlight at this year’s Mobile World Congress 2014 event, but distributed antenna systems continue to outpace small cells in terms of carrier spending. And in Barcelona, it was quite clear that DAS is not giving way to small cells. If anything, interest in indoor antenna solutions was more keen this year than last.
“Not only are carriers continuing to drive demand, so are the enterprise customers that want to own their own systems, and the tower companies. The tower companies have been much more aggressive in sort of driving the ownership of those DAS systems. So we’re sort of seeing that perfect storm,” said Darlene Braunschweig of DAS provider Tempest Telecom.
“DAS is making a comeback,” said Rupert Baines, technology strategy and marketing at Real Wireless. “A year or two ago DAS looked like it was sort of slowing down, maturing and the industry initiatives were all coming from small cells.”
Baines was deeply involved in the small cell world at Picochip and at Mindspeed, which was recently acquired by Intel. He says that he sees operators evaluating small cells and DAS on a case-by-case basis. “It’s horses for courses,” said Baines. “For this installation, under this configuration, we want DAS because it’s multi-operator perhaps, but in this building we won’t use DAS, we’ll use small cells because of the capacity advantages. But there’s no one size fits all.”
A number of key DAS providers launched new products and initiatives at MWC 2014. Axell introduced intelligent digital DAS, which manages the interface from base stations to the DAS system to ensure optimum performance for both single and multiple operator deployments.
Kathrein showcased its K-BOW solution, which supports multi-operator, multi-band and multi-standard operation. Kathrein and Axell both offer solutions that they claim can “dynamically allocate” capacity, meaning that an operator can remotely shift capacity from one building to another depending on the demand.
CommScope showcased its ION-E solution at MWC 2014. ION-E brings together licensed wireless and power plus gigabit Ethernet for Wi-Fi into one unified wireless network that it claims can scale to building size and is technology and spectrum adaptive.
TE Connectivity announced a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent to connect base stations to DAS systems without a remote radio head.
“We will come directly from an [Alcatel-Lucent] baseband unit or BBU via fiber optics directly into the TE DAS host unit,” said Tony Lefebvre, director or product management at TE Connectivity. “We will then take that and we will package that in our digital transport with other services. Then we have a digital fiber optic link all the way up to our remote – that’s when we’ll bring it up to analog RF.”
Tempest Telecom‘s Braunschweig sees almost as much innovation with new DAS business models as with new technologies. Building owners are stepping up to find new ways to finance installations, and carriers are leveraging DAS installations to provide coverage to a surrounding area.
“If you had told me a year ago that what this business would transition into … I’d say your crazy, no way,” said Braunschweig. “I can honestly tell you that our teams are working. … I have guys working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
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