Tag: Small Cells

LTE and Small Cells Dominate Discussions at Bogotá Seminar

It’s been over two years since we visited our friends in Colombia so it was about time we returned there. The Colombian ecosystem welcomed us with open arms – we had over 65 participants (double what we had when we visited in 2013) from many organizations, including some of the major Colombian mobile operators and all of the major OEMs. Colombia has over 48 million mobile subscribers keeping our ecosystem busy and on their toes so we had A LOT to talk about.

Held at the Radisson Royal Bogotá Hotel, we were told by our participants that the seminar was highly anticipated as the region doesn’t play host to many in-building networking events. Some participants traveled from Medellín to attend and we even had a few people from Ecuador join us.

Some of the major themes discussed included:

  • LTE is new to Colombia so many discussions focused around the challenges of deploying it
  • Effective small cell deployments were also a very hot topic for our participants

Thank you to all of our participants and a special thanks to our panelists from Sertenlite who revealed some of the key relevant matters for the Colombian market and provided a very valuable discussion.

Congratulations to our winner of a FREE iBwave Certification session (with a value of nearly $3,000 USD), Enrique Bravo from Telefonica.

Innovations and Successes in Streamlining Indoor Small Cells Planning – MWC Day 3

Today at Mobile World Congress, an important highlight for us is the presentation of Benoit Fleury, our VP Products & Innovation at the Small Cell Forum booth on the Latest Innovations and Successes in Streamlining Indoor Small Cells Planning.

Here are the main points covered:

  • Key indoor market stats, drivers and challenges;
  • Complexities, challenges and unique dynamics particular to small cell planning and deployment;
  • Higher volume leading to a need for faster deployment cycles and a simpler process.

Did you know that out of an estimated 30 billion square meters of office space on earth, only 2% has adequate indoor wireless coverage?

Benoit then describes the small cells planning workflow and how the iBwave product suite facilitates it. He goes into further detail on iBwave Mobile Planner, our in-building app for wireless mobility on the go, which allows field teams to plan a small cell network in three steps:

  1. Create floor plan and environment zones;
  2. Collect RF data, select small cells and run prediction;
  3. Add network equipment (from our database of over 16,000 parts) and include annotations.

Next, Benoit brings in a real-life small cell deployment case study demonstrating the amount of time that can be saved.

A typical small cell site survey scenario is described below with each step and the amount of hours each one takes using traditional methods:

In contrast, the same scenario using iBwave Mobile Planner. Steps are simplified and some are no longer needed:

48% time savings – that’s pretty significant.

Benoit then invites Art King, Director of Enterprise Services and Technologies at SpiderCloud to present. Mr. King presents his own case study of a 1.5 million square foot multi-level building that they recently worked on. He shows the significant savings and great results achieved through the use of iBwave Mobile Planner.

SpiderCloud released some big news at MWC as well – a new collaboration with Cisco to resell SpiderCloud’s small cell portfolio and with Vodafone as the first client to this new collaboration. Read their press release here.

It’s hard to believe that there is only one day left of Mobile World Congress. Come back tomorrow to get our final conclusions from the event as well some video footage from the show.

Small Cells in Rural & Remote Environments – News from the Small Cell Forum

As members of the Small Cell Forum, iBwave has contributed to the acceleration in adoption of small cells within a variety of environments. Therefore, we are excited for this latest release from the Small Cell Forum, which focuses on rural and remote small cell deployment.

Small Cell Forum Update: Release Five and the quickening pace of technological change.

From the home, the enterprise, the street and the cafe to the remote village in the developing world and the offshore oil rig in the wildest seas: communications in any and every environment can use and be enhanced by small cells.

That’s not an unfounded assertion. It’s backed up by a vast amount of work that the Small Cell Forum’s members have done and are still doing to build and enhance contributions to small cell technology, standards development and deployments.

This work has been highlighted by the Small Cell Forum Release Program and is now available through a series of downloadable resources offering a guide to small cell deployment across numerous use cases. With Release Five, launched at this year’s Mobile World Congress the Forum has shone the spotlight on their continuing work on small cell deployment in remote and rural areas.

‘Continuing’ is the key word here. While Release Five discusses the viability of an impressive range of use cases, the needs and the economic and social rewards of those use cases will develop.

Technology, standards, market drivers, economics and regulation will all evolve as small cell technology evolves. And as more commercial deployments take place everywhere — not just in remote and rural areas — Small Cell Forum aims to make use cases richer, demonstrating best practice and resolving barriers to small cell adoption.

Download the release documents today.
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