NSN’s powerful new Flexi Zone small cells boost mobile broadband performance indoors, outdoors #MWC14

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Espoo, Finland (PRWEB UK) 20 February 2014 -- Nokia Solutions and Networks is creating new ways to deploy and integrate LTE and Wi-Fi to boost Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) capacity and coverage, indoors and outdoors. A comprehensive expansion of the Flexi Zone small cells range adds TD-LTE and extra frequency bands, as well as incorporating Wi-Fi. A new indoor Flexi Zone pico base station, the industry’s smallest, is the only indoor small cell with the same capacity and running the same software as a macro base station. Pico base stations for indoor coverage provide easier connection options and higher capacity than a distributed antenna system (DAS)* can offer.

"Although operator interest in small cells is clearly growing, deployments have been limited as operators still have lots of concerns with current small cell offerings. Vendor enhancements, such as those NSN has recently announced, are bringing those portfolios in better alignment with real-world operator requirements," said Daryl Schoolar, principal analyst, network infrastructure, Ovum. "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."

NSN’s new 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, offering 30% lower overall costs than conventional units. They also benefit from NSN’s recently announced dynamic, load-balancing eICIC that provides 30% capacity improvement**.
• 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. In addition, 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. "Adding Flexi Zone controller can create almost unlimited capacity and up to very large indoor coverage by deploying clusters of access points, which also deliver overall cost savings of up to 50% compared to conventional small cell deployments."

Click here and here to download photos illustrating the new indoor Flexi Zone pico base station, the only indoor small cell with the same capacity and running the same software as a macro base station.

To learn more about NSN’s latest Flexi Zone enhancements, network operators, customers, press and analysts are welcome to visit NSN’s Experience Center in Hall 3, 3B10 at Mobile World Congress, Fira Gran Via, in Barcelona, Spain.

We invite you to watch a video and follow our launches on http://www.nsn.com/performance, and register for the #NSNperformance webinar series starting on March 13, 2014.

To share your thoughts on small cells and Flexi Zone, join the discussion with @NSNtweets on Twitter using #MWC14, #NSNperformance, #smallcells and #HetNet. For expert insights, visit our blog.

About NSN

Nokia Solutions and Networks is the world’s specialist in mobile broadband. From the first ever call on GSM, to the first call on LTE, we operate at the forefront of each generation of mobile technology. Our global experts invent the new capabilities our customers need in their networks. We provide the world’s most efficient mobile networks, the intelligence to maximize the value of those networks, and the services to make it all work seamlessly.

With headquarters in Espoo, Finland, we operate in over 120 countries and had net sales of approximately 11.3 billion euros in 2013. NSN is wholly owned by Nokia Corporation. http://www.nsn.com

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Notes:

*A distributed antenna system, or DAS, is a network of antenna nodes connected to a macro-cellular base station via a transport medium. Providing wireless service to a building, DAS systems use different transport mediums, such as coaxial cabling, fiber or dedicated Ethernet, to link a central macro base station (building basement or similar) to antennas on every floor. Operators need to make a significant investment to install these dedicated transport mediums in existing or new buildings. This also makes the system inflexible and difficult to scale.

Using a mix of fiber and dedicated Ethernet, Hybrid DASs are a more recent variant of DAS that takes advantage of remote radio heads deployed closer to the antennas.

**NSN recently launched a dynamic, load-balancing enhanced Inter Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) solution that goes above and beyond the 3GPP standards. It manages interference while balancing the subscriber load across the small cell and macro layers. For more information, see the press release ‘NSN breaks new ground with LTE-Advanced for superior performance’.

***NSN Flexi Zone architecture enables up to 100 small cells to be aggregated and coordinated by a localized controller to form a hot zone, allowing network capacity to scale up almost limitlessly without affecting the rest of the network. By managing small cell clusters, the Flexi Zone controller enables operators to save 50% of the overall costs of conventional deployments and improve performance compared to stand-alone small cells.

Media Relations, NSN, http://nsn.com, +358 714002869, [email protected]