SOLiD GENESIS solution balances relationship between middleprise building owners and carriers
Service providers, while eager to invest in marquee venues like major league stadiums, airports and high-end enterprise buildings, have struggled to deliver quality in-building wireless coverage and capacity to buildings that fall into the middleprise category—between 100,000 and 500,000-square-feet. The addressable middleprise market is huge, but, for years, the economics largely haven’t helped carriers balance risk with capital expense. That leaves building owners in a bad position as property value suffers, leasing rates go down and vacancies increase.
During Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain, SOLiD Americas President Ken Sandfeld explained to RCR Wireless News how the company had combined its DAS expertise, modular radio portfolio and optical transport solutions with a software solution and new business model to create a “balanced and equitable relationship” between building owners and carriers.
“We’re essentially flipping supply and demand on its ear,” he said. “No longer will a building owner have to talk to the carriers about supplying base station equipment and trying to entice them into doing something in the building. The building owner will have complete control. It will ultimately become a capacity supplier to the carrier. The carrier will end up demanding that capacity from the building owner. It really changes the game because it allows both parties to have a win-win.”
The GENESIS platform consists of four major components:
- GENESIS RAX (Radio Access eXchange) is a multi-operator, multi-band vRAN signal source.
- GENESIS DAS is SOLiD’s evolved infrastructure that’s simpler, smaller and less expensive.
- GENESIS CLOUD provides flexible, scalable management for the platform components.
- GENESIS MARKETPLACE is the application that connects building owners and carriers.
Think of GENESIS MARKETPLACE, essentially an open capacity exchange, like Uber or airBNB—the application connects supply with demand. Building owners can now provide service providers with the ability to better serve in-building users while eliminating capex and reducing opex. Further, despite not owning the platform or in-building hardware, operators can still achieve granular network visibility to maintain quality of experience and control customer demand. Sandfeld called this a “game changer” in terms of re-balancing the relationship between building owners and carriers.
GENESIS RAX replaces expensive, operationally complex and space-consuming base stations; the small, affordable, modular virtual radio access network allows building owners to totally control their signal source. The plug-and-play nature of RAX allows carriers to turn up service quickly, while passing value on to both building owners and end-users, empowering all parties.
Sandaled called it “the key” to the platform. “GENESIS RAX ultimately allows the building owner to own the signal source and to be able to scale for the capacity that’s needed in that building. What you’ll see from SOLiD is continued evolution to be able to supply solutions for the middleprise that reduce the overall installation costs, equipment costs and overall ease of use.”
Click here for a video overview of SOLiD’s GENESIS solution; to read more about the new solution, click here.
