A conversation with Philip Sorrells, Vice President of Strategic Marketing, CommScope
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In this conversation on RAN optimization with Philip Sorrells, Vice President of Strategic Marketing at CommScope we focused on the role antennas have in improving performance and coverage in the RAN, and how the scope for these improvements can be crucial for operators to meet the growing demand for capacity and high levels of QoE.
One important solution for mobile operator is to split their cell sectors – typically from three to six, with a two-beam antenna. The new trend is towards a five-beam antenna for areas with high traffic density. Philip said: “You can imagine subscribers all want to use their mobile devices at the same time. In that particular area, they have our five-beam antenna solution, which penetrates that landing area and provides really fantastic-quality service for customers in that location.”
Indoor infrastructure is emerging as a crucial way to increase capacity. Philip told us: “There’s something like 30 billion square meters of enterprise space that needs mobile coverage and doesn’t have it today. As an RF guy, I see that as real estate where I can put in cell sites. Building capacity into networks is all about densification, and you’ve got to have real estate to densify. There is all this real estate available for densification, but we’ve got to get the right mix of technologies into those enterprise building locations.”
Read our conversation with Philip to see how antenna technology can improve resource utilization and lead to leaner networks that cost less to deploy and operate.
This interview is part of our upcoming report “The smart RAN. Trends in the optimization of spectrum and network resource utilization.” We have also discussed this topic at length in our recent RAN Optimization webinar