Machine learning can make densification viable with improved planning

It is a serious over-simplification to say that small cells improve capacity and coverage. They only do this optimally and cost-effectively if they are deployed in the very best locations. As 5G looms, and the number of cells increases exponentially in some urban or commercial environments, planning will become critical to the business case for densification. Accurate planning has always been important – in the early days, Orange and others published figures to show the contrast in user experience when a single cell was deployed in different outdoor locations, with as much as five times slower speed when the cell was sited sub-optimally. But now, the challenges of planning the best sites to achieve well-targeted, interference-free signals for 4G and…