Heterogeneous network news continues to stream out of Mobile World Congress with announcements in Wi-Fi and small cells dominating the proceedings.
Nokia Siemens Networks is highlighting new small cell products, including new micro- and picocell base stations for LTE and Wi-Fi that can be integrated into the company’s Flexi Zone architecture for high-traffic areas. Nokia Siemens also launched new femtocells – including HSPA+ and its first LTE femtocell – for targeted coverage of enterprises and indoor public areas, along with hetnet services to support customer experience management, analyze traffic hotspots and ensure sufficient backhaul capacity.
The company also introduced its Smart Wi-Fi product as part of an overall heterogeneous networks vision.
Wi-Fi is getting a boost from AT&T as well, which announced some stats on booming Wi-Fi usage. The carrier said that between 2011 and 2012, the number of connections made to its Wi-Fi network more than doubled, with mobile device traffic increasing three-fold to over 5.2 billion megabytes in 2012. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Wi-Fi connections from smartphones and tablets were up 40% from the same period in 2011, and the quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile data uploads on its Wi-Fi network was more than 190%, AT&T reported.
AT&T’s hotspot network includes more than 32,000 carrier hotspots, plus access to an additional 402,000 hotspots globally via roaming agreements. The company said it is seeing particular success in retail locations and hotels, with customers spending more than 7 billion minutes connected at retail stores covered by its Wi-Fi and an average connection time of 45 minutes. AT&T said it increased its hotspot coverage in hotels by 225% last year, adding more than 95,000 guest rooms.
Echoing that trend, Aruba Networks said that NTT subsidiary NTT Broadband Platform chose its wireless LAN infrastructure for its new Wi-Fi Cloud Service. The offering powers one of the largest Wi-Fi services in Japan provided by a retail company – Seven Spots, a free service that is offered in convenience stores, restaurants and supermarkets. NTTBP already has plans to increase to 120,000 the number of base stations that function as Wi-Fi hotspots, according to its president, Tadao Kobayashi.
Aruba also this week introduced its new HybridControl Wi-Fi Architecture for operators looking to deploy dual-purpose Wi-Fi infrastructure for cellular network offload and managed services. Aruba said a single controller can support more than 32,000 hotspots.
AirHop Networks, which provides RAN software, is demonstrating a hetnet planning tool this week that allows operators to virtually overlay self-organizing network small cells on an existing mobile network and simulate operations to successfully plan and deploy small cell infrastructure. AirHop’s vSON platform is designed to allow mobile operators replace simulated data from their current networks with real network data in order to detect problems and troubleshoot more efficiently.
