New radios from Ericsson promise low-visibility, high-performance 5G in busy urban areas
5Gradar, Rachael Sharpe, 8.30.21
Ericsson has announced it is expanding its portfolio of 5G radios with three new offerings geared toward urban environments. The compact and lightweight radios are designed to seamlessly blend in with streetlights, buildings and other urban hardscapes and form part of Ericsson Street Solutions and have been designed to allow communications service providers (CSPs) to build robust 5G service, across all bands in urban environments while blending in seamlessly with the cityscapes.
“Urban deployments are critical for reaching the full potential of 5G,” said Kevin Zvokel, Head of Networks for Ericsson North America. “We know CSPs are looking for ways to deploy quickly and with simplicity, maximizing the 5G user experience while leveraging minimally intrusive equipment. Ericsson’s solutions do just this and can bring a complete 5G network to life across all bands,” Zvokel continued.
5G in dense urban environments
According to Ericsson’s annual mobility report, by the end of 2021, 25 percent of the global population will have 5G coverage. Furthermore, in North America, more than 360 million 5G subscriptions are anticipated in the region by 2026, accounting for 84 percent of mobile subscriptions. However, 5G networks in dense urban environments can suffer.
As 5G comes to US cities, urban rollouts are grappling with challenges like how to deploy non-intrusive sites, how best to utilise all frequency layers, and how to streamline site permitting and installation. Many sites need to expand 5G capacity, and hotspots and streets need strengthened capacity in both low, mid and high band to build a complete 5G network as traffic grows and that’s where Ericsson’s three new offerings: Street Radio 4402, AIR 4435 and Street Macro 6705, geared toward urban environments come in.
Designed to turn a streetlight into a low or mid-band 5G site in 15 minutes, Street Radio 4402 are compact radios and are an industry-unique collaboration with Ubicquia, boosting 4G and 5G experience with zero footprint.
AIR 4435 is the world’s smallest 4T4R street antenna-integrated radio and is designed for minimum footprint and easy installations, adding excellent mid-band capacity to macro coverage gaps. The Street Macro 6705 is a complete mmWave base station with integrated RAN Compute. It’s an industry-leading end-to-end solution with low visual impact.
Five times better network performance
Ericsson Street Solutions, of which these three new products are part of, also include transport solutions for any 5G street site, with wired and wireless backhaul and fronthaul solutions. The portfolio also boasts zero footprint power systems for street and hotspot sites are 100 percent carry to site, with low maintenance and operations costs. By boosting performance across all spectrum layers, Ericsson’s zero- footprint radios can achieve 5x better network performance.
