Ericsson has unveiled its fourth generation of Massive MIMO radio/antennas, targeting the unpaired midband spectrum that is the mainstay of early 5G roll-out in most countries. It has made significant strides in the size and power consumption of its units, vying with Huawei in reducing the ‘massive’ element of these 5G units, at least when it comes to tower space and weight, and so lowering cost barriers to widespread operator adoption.
And Ericsson was unambivalent in crediting performance and efficiency improvements to the new generation of its inhouse radio silicon, in a pointed riposte to the argument that an open silicon ecosystem could come to the macro 5G market any time soon. The Swedish company is cautious about merchant chips even in the baseband processing elements of the macro RAN – in the radio, the prospect is even further away, it argues.
Indeed, it is emphasizing the competitive edge that, it says, comes from full control of silicon design by calling its portfolio of chips Ericsson Silicon, rather than hiding them away under the hood.
The internally designed system-on-chip family is used across Ericsson’s whole portfolio of radios, RAN compute (basebands) and transport networks. The intense focus on this platform demonstrates how vital it is to the Swedish firm’s differentiation at a time when the industry is beguiled by visions of RANs that run on general purpose processors (in the baseband) and even merchant radio chips from companies like Qualcomm. There may also be an element of rubbing salt in the wounds of Nokia, whose early 5G efforts were damaged in late 2019 by problems with its own SoC, co-developed with a merchant partner.
The latest innovations in the Ericsson SoC platform, which is refreshed each year, underpin the new set of three midband 5G radios that made their public debut last week, alongside six vRAN compute products.
The three Massive MIMO products are:
- The AIR 6419, for dense urban capacity sites, which supports 200 MHz of bandwidth with a 64T64R antenna array and targets the 3.4-3.6 GHz band
- The AIR 3258, which supports 400 MHz with a 32T32R array in the 2.4-2.8 GHz band. It is specifically designed for European operators. For the AIR 3258, the frequency range is 3.4-3.6
- The AIR 3219, also a 32T3R product with 200 MHz bandwidth, also in 2.4-2.8 GHz. For the AIR 3219, the frequency range is 3.4-3.8
The smallest product weighs just 20 kilograms and the largest 27kg. The lower weights and sizes are critical to scaling-up of 5G. Ericsson Massive MIMO units previously weight up to 36kg and were harder to install on roofs and buildings, rather than big towers. Larger size restricts the flexibility to deploy city networks and may increase the fees for tower space, and it also affects energy levels.
“If you cannot make the size smaller, you cannot use passive cooling,” said Sibel Tombaz, Ericsson’s head of 5G highband and midband active antenna systems.
With the help of the compact new form factor, all three products sport passive cooling to help reduce energy consumption, with 320 watts of output power. All three can be adapted to other midband spectrum variants.
The new additions to the RAN Compute portfolio include two basebands and two RAN processors for indoor deployments, and two RAN processors for outdoor environments. Ericsson says these offerings deliver throughput rates up to 50% higher than its previous generation of midband RAN products while consuming up to 20% less power.
The focus of the launch was firmly on integrated RAN designs rather than disaggregated or virtualized architectures, though Ericsson did recently unveil its Cloud-RAN portfolio and plans to make this fully available later this year. But as Rethink’s operator surveys show, in large-scale macro 5G networks with demanding performance requirements, only a small minority of MNOs expect to adopt virtualized and disaggregated RAN platforms in the next 3-4 years. Most of the deployment of such networks will be seen initially in greenfield, rural or enterprise environments.
“After the first roll-outs of 5G networks, now is the time to scale up 5G by leveraging Massive MIMO to a much larger extent,” said Per Narvinger, head of product area networks at Ericsson.