As chips and mobile handsets shrink in size, so do base stations. Major infrastructure vendors believe it is the wave of the future.
Nokia Corp. reflected this when it unveiled what it described as the smallest, high-power W-CDMA base station to the U.S. market.
Known as the Nokia MetroSite 50 BTS, Nokia describes the base station as a “siteless” solution that can be installed “anywhere, in any environment-outdoor, indoor, on various surfaces, and in different positions.” They can also be on poles, closets, roofs and basements.
“It’s like the size of a small refrigerator in a college dormitory,” explained Jim Harper, Nokia senior manager for W-CDMA system marketing.
Smaller base stations offer business benefits to both carriers and vendors. “The flexibility will yield up to 30 percent in site and deployment cost savings and will enable operators to build a larger footprint for revenue-generating W-CDMA services, like videoconferencing, audio and video streaming, and high-speed corporate services,” said Nokia.
Nokia is not alone. L.M. Ericsson and Lucent Technologies Inc. also have compact base stations on the market.
“What we have done in the recent past is make them more powerful with twice as much capacity or chop them in half and make them more efficient,” said Kathy O’Connell, CDMA product marketing manager with Lucent.
She said her company responded to demands from operators that asked Lucent to trim size. Lucent in 2002 unveiled one common BTS platform, which enabled it to put efficient components in one big box with double capacity, according to O’Connell. The company’s compact base station is the Flexent Modular Cells 4.0 Compact.
“The trend is to have base stations for different situations,” remarked Lars Nilsson, director of business strategy at Ericsson.
Ericsson has various several versions of its base stations for W-CDMA, CDMA and GSM technologies.
Nilsson said the smaller base stations provide a trade-off between capacity and coverage, explaining that smaller base stations cover smaller cells but provide greater efficiency.
“It’s more important to have capacity in the big cities,” he said. For example, at Grand Central Station in New York City, capacity is more important than coverage area. In a place like that, Nilsson explained, carriers can have a number of compact base stations that more efficiently cover smaller cells.
Harper said Nokia’s base stations will not replace the bigger ones, but complement them, adding that they will be fill-ins in dense metropolitan areas.
Nokia said the MetroSite 50 BTSs are designed to follow a “pay-as-you-evolve structure,” which means low operational expenses and low-power consumption once installed.
“It uniquely complements the rest of our portfolio of base stations,” he said.
O’Connell said the components of current base stations stood alone before operator pressure compelled vendors to bring them together in one box. She explained that other than smaller footprints and more capacity, the compact base stations consume less power and are self-diagnostic, which means the devices alert technicians to hitches or coming problems, thereby saving costs.
Part of the operator benefit of the compact products is that operators will not have to lease land or pay as much rent as they do for bigger ones. O’Connell said Lucent’s compact base stations are backward compatible and work smoothly with the older, bigger versions.
