Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Berlin Fan Mile at New Year
The deployment was timed for the German capital’s New Year’s Eve event, with over one million visitors attending a party on the Fan Mile.
This runs from the centre of Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate and sets network operators the challenge of providing the necessary mobile coverage using basestations which must not be intrusive due to local planning regulations.
According to Matthias Johannes, a group leader at Telefónica Germany, Cobham’s DAS allows the operator “to shift our capacity to important hot-spots when it’s required.”
The network deployment incorporated 27 of Cobham’s idDAS digital remote units concealed from view in underground enclosures along the length of the street and around the Brandenburg Gate. These were connected to a basestation hotel 25km away from the site using optical fibre links.
This network architecture is designed to be readily expandable with more capacity and more frequencies, to incorporate other carriers or route high-bandwidth services.
Ian Langley, general manager, Cobham Wireless said:
“This first deployment of idDAS perfectly demonstrates the abilities of the technology to supply high-bandwidth services to hundreds of thousands of people, while saving operators both capital and operating costs.
“This revolutionary Cloud-RAN supporting technology has the power to bring inner-city cellular coverage to a new level, providing close to 100% coverage in areas traditionally suffering from environmental or capacity issues.”
The idDAS technology was originality developed for high capacity in-building wireless coverage by Axell Wireless, which is now part of Cobham.
But DAS networks are now being used to provide data capacity in out-door hot-spot areas such as arenas and public events.
The system uses signal processing and filtering techniques to optimise basestation throughput. It is compatible with GSM and LTE, and supports all major
frequency bands used by mobile operators across the world.
The system incorporates a 1Gbyte IP backhaul per remote unit with common cabling infrastructure.
It also includes full and easy support of MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) basestations for increased data throughput.
Cobham Wireless used SXF-Plan as its integration partner in Berlin.
Cobham will present the idDAS wireless network technology at MWC 2016 in Barcelona next month (22-25 February).
