Deployment went from planning to live in 75 days
LONDON, England – Tier 3 carrier Nex-Tech Wireless, driven by customer complaints and a tight deadline, used small cells to connect a stadium in the heart of its coverage area in just 75 days.
Nathan Sutter, Nex-Tech Wireless’ director of network operations and engineering, highlighted the quick turnaround during a presentation at Small Cells World Summit this week.
He called Gross Coliseum at Fort Hays State University in Kansas a “problem child. We had a large event take place in this venue. Customer complaints were large.”
The problem came to the forefront during a wrestling tournament held in the 322,000-square-foot venue and Nex-Tech took the situation so seriously, the company committed to solving the problem prior to a quickly approaching graduation.
“We had 75 days to fix it and get something in place and get customer experience better,” Sutter said.
The company weighed its options: upgrading the distributed antenna system proved to be too costly while standalone small cells – also costly – created significant RF interference, not to mention challenges with backhaul.
Enter the Airvana OneCell, which centralizes equipment in a telecom cabinet and, in this case, required a single Ethernet cable run to each small cell to provide both power and connectivity.
“With the OneCell system,” Sutter said, “We were able to provide backhaul to one area and distribute it throughout the facility. This was key.
“The graduation live-use happened really without a hitch. It was a resounding success,” he continued. “Our goals were timeline and customer experience. We had had a lot of customer complaints and had missed the mark in a very big way. We received no customer complaints. We were able to get 50 Mbps down during most of the event. I want to stress that this was conceived, executed and deployed in less than 90 days. OneCell met our objectives. For us, the next question is where do we go from here?”
Sutter mentioned opportunities in other verticals including large enterprise and hospitals. “This solution certainly bears out. It helps us be flexible and provide the best possible service to our customers.”
“This is a clear proof point,” Michael McFarland, senior director of product marketing and management for Airvana, said about the Fort Hays use case.
He went through how distributed radio points tie into a centralized baseband controller. “We’ve pooled the baseband processing into this controller. That’s why we refer to this as a C-RAN architecture. We run this over traditional Ethernet. The other aspect is this is an all IP architecture. There’s no CPRI and there’s no analogue. We leverage the Ethernet to provide both power and timing synchronization.”
McFarland also mentioned the importance of low deployment costs: “In our industry we talk about plug and play and how that makes the deployment easier. But it really only addresses the provisioning step. Operators really need the entire process to be simplified.”
