The TD-LTE ecosystem has been gathering steam in the past year, driven by China Mobile’s massive trials and other players like Softbank and Reliance Industries. However, while most of these players talk up the potential of small cells to ramp up capacity and coverage quickly, there has been a gap where a standard platform should be.
This is an opportunity which Belgium-based start-up Accelleran aims to grasp, claiming the industry’s first fully fledged TD-LTE small cell based on a single-chip platform. This approach is vital to the economics of small cell networks, but even in FD-LTE, these fully integrated products are only just becoming commercial and early trials have often relied on devices heavily customized for the carrier.
Even China Mobile’s initial ‘small cell’ roll-outs for TD-LTE have not been real metrocells ‘ the cellco has been deploying remote radio heads, as part of its Cloud-RAN, and some compact picocells, but none yet based on an all-in-one platform.
Accelleran will be hoping to catch the attention of Mobile, and some of the other 53 operators now committed to the cadet branch of LTE, with its M101 base station. This is optimized for public access and urban hotzones, supporting 20MHz channels in all the main TDD bands ‘ 2.3GHz and 2.5/2.6GHz in their various regional variations, and 3.5GHz, which some believe will become a global roaming band for 4G small cells.
These bands have high capacity but short range, and so are mainly targeted for adding urban capacity to macrocells. TDD-only carriers which only hold these higher frequencies will have particularly early need for small cells because they are needed to make economic sense of spectrum above 2.2GHz, and because they are well suited to the heavy-duty data services at which TD-LTE excels.
The M101 provides 1W of RF power per antenna port and can support one or two sectors. It has two transceivers, each with 1W (30dBm), with 2×2 MIMO and 5MHz, 10MHz, 15MHz or 20MHz channels. It includes optional integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet and IEEE1588v2 Precision Timing Client.
There will be tough competition of course, not least from Chinese vendors and from Alcatel-Lucent, which recently announced the TDD version of its lightRadio distributed platform together with China Mobile ‘ ALU has been filling out the lightRadio offering with metrocells and Wi-Fi as well as its antenna/radio ‘cube’ units for Cloud-RAN.
But despite its size, China Mobile is not the only target, and indeed, TD-LTE device early movers, like LG, have made some of their first breakthroughs in the Middle East.
Jeff Land, business development director at Accelleran, said in a statement: ‘More than 50 carriers have TDD spectrum only, and many others including major operators Softbank, Sprint (via Clearwire) and Vodafone have both TDD and FDD spectrum. Many of these are deploying small cells today on their FDD networks, but have been frustrated by the lack of availability of TD-LTE small cells. Accelleran was founded to address that lack.’
The firm was founded at the start of this year around a team with a decade of experience in small cell development, including the Thomson Technicolor project.