Railway tunnels and cuttings, underground railways, mines, oil rigs, lampposts, bus stops and stadiums. Small cells, and their more venerable cousin the DAS (Distributed Antenna System), are cropping up in all sorts of tricky-to-serve locations. They bring high quality public and private mobile service to places which really matter to their occupants, but which don’t get served via the traditional ‘colour by numbers’ approach to radio planning via macrocells.
But what are the engineering challenges to meeting these needs? How have the options for serving these special places changed over the years? How do you design systems to meet the needs? Can the engineering design process be made scalable and standardised, or does every system need to be hand crafted? How do you span the needs of multiple operators and private network applications? How do you overcome deployment challenges like constrained space, limited access to busy and dangerous sites and tricky power and backhaul requirements? And how do you make the business case work?
Hosted by Cambridge Wireless and its Small Cell Special Interest Group (Small Cell SIG), this event will be exploring all these issues and more via real-world case studies, hearing from the experts who have pushed back the design boundaries to create robust systems in iconic and overlooked venues using the latest in small cell, DAS and RF technologies.
