CommScope highlighted new antennas, a fixed wireless system and an in-building wireless platform ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress show.
The North Carolina telecom infrastructure company on Wednesday said new antenna models would utilize 4xMIMO technology, advanced modulation and carrier aggregation of unlicensed frequency bands to help achieve Gigabit LTE speeds.
The announcement came hours after the company’s introduction of an integrated antenna solution based on the xRAN open interface — which marked CommScope’s entry into the fixed wireless market.
The latter system integrates a beamforming active antenna array operating at 28 GHz and includes a base station antenna — with 120-degree beam-steering of four MIMO ports and a 256-element antenna array — and remote radio unit.
CommScope said wireless operators could use off-the-shelf commercial servers to conduct trials of virtualized network functions for fixed wireless. The system is expected to be ready for those trials in the middle of the year.
“Our integrated antenna will enable the full capabilities of 5G millimeter wave spectrum bands while offering maximum flexibility in an evolving air-interface environment,” CommScope SVP Farid Firouzbakht said in a statement.
One day earlier, the company announced its new CommScope Era system, which officials said would help establish more efficient and flexible networks within buildings, as well as facilitate the cell site densification needed for 5G.
The Era system uses centralized radio access network hubs with a Wide-area Integration Node to route baseband capacity to a distribution point within a structure or a collection of buildings.
By allocating capacity where it is needed, the CommScope Era system can reduce the amount of on-site equipment and fiber required for signals by up to 90 percent, the company said.
“We have invested heavily to create an all-digital platform architecture that upends the economics of in-building wireless and ushers in a new era and standard for distributed antenna systems,” added SVP Matt Melester. “CommScope Era will be a key enabler for network densification in LTE Advanced, Gigabit LTE and 5G.”
Filed Under: Infrastructure
