CTIA: Huawei doing small cells the old-fashioned way

Huawei today revealed its North American small cell strategy at CTIA Wireless, launching three microcell products that integrate the radio, antenna and baseband processing into a single compact unit.

Designed to support long-term evolution (LTE), high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) and WiMax across all of the U.S. and Canadian mobile broadband frequencies, the new cells will give Huawei a key advantage as operators shift their focus from 3G and 4G to coverage to building for capacity, said Madan Jagernauth, vice president of wireless marketing and product management.

Jagernauth said that microcells are a far more realistic way of approaching the multi-layered heterogeneous networks operators will require than the new network architecture being proposed by competitors like Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) and Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI).

In the last month, both vendors have unveiled new concepts in radio access network design that transform the RAN from vertically integrated dedicated base station sites into highly modular and distributed cloud-based architectures (CP: NSN pours out Liquid Radio and CP: ALU’s new building-block architecture does away with the base station), while vendors like Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) have said they’re working on similar architectures.

Huawei, however, views these concepts as just that, Jagernauth said. “Some of the concepts you’ve heard from other folks are just concepts, not products,” he said. “I want our customers to know we have real solutions today versus concepts that may or may not be reality.”

Though both NSN and Alcatel-Lucent acknowledge that not every aspect of their respective Liquid Radio and lightRadio product lines are ready for commercial deployment on day 1, the primary components of their new architectures are either already deployed in commercial networks, in trial or will be starting trials within the year.

But Jugernauth said that the core principle of these new network designs—separating baseband processing from the cell site—is an old concept and one that isn’t necessary practical except in a few situations. Shipping an RF signal over a backhaul connection is an extremely inefficient compared to shipping digital IP data, he said. While it might make sense in one-off deployments where space is at a high premium, building a network around the concept would require enormous backhaul capacity, he concluded.

Huawei, however, believes its microcell architecture would have the opposite effect. Like ALU’s Cube integrated antenna, the Huawei cells transmit at extremely low power, between 1 and 5 Watts, but rather than a fiber or high-bandwidth wireless connection the cells could be hung off a copper twisted pair, utilizing the most commonly available backhaul in the market, Jugernauth said. Ultimately the approach gives an operator far more flexibility, especially as it scales small cells into the thousands and even tens of thousands of units, he said.