Network operators and municipalities across the country are striving to enable 5G mobile services for customers in urban areas. This requires installing thousands of outdoor small cells to meet coverage and capacity demands. Operator technical requirements (radios, antennas), municipal aesthetic requirements and power company metering/power requirements vary greatly across the US - from coast to coast, state to state and even street to street within cities. Adding to this campus settings and private LTE networks and the volume of different configuration requirements can be daunting. Clearly, one size does not fit all, and this wide variety creates natural obstacles across the ecosystem in the deployment of 5G densified networks. Let’s look at some of the obstacles and how they can be overcome.
Requirements and potential obstacles
Site acquisition and aesthetics - small cells are designed for street-level deployment, and local governments want to provide attractive cityscapes for their residents. Accommodating the varied technical and aesthetic requirements while also incorporating future and evolving technologies can be a challenge. While all parties want and are quickly moving forward in deployments it’s hard to keep up with the technical requirements, especially for municipalities and public utilities who may not be as familiar as mobile operators. Enter the design and manufacturing community to work with the ecosystem of stakeholders to design concealment solutions that meet today’s requirements as well as future considerations.
Power and Fiber backhaul - small cells require more power beyond what is supplied for streetlights, and fiber to the site. Although it sounds simple, getting it there can be costly and a long process. Public Utilities and municipalities may look to explore synergies with other infrastructure projects like distributed power systems, smart meter conversion and coupling fiber builds with street improvements to decrease the time and costs in the long haul.
Addressing the challenges
There are several strategies for overcoming these challenges.
Standardization is one key to success. Initial small cell deployments were custom installations requiring site-by-site engineering, which made these installations too expensive for widespread use. But today, telecom equipment manufacturers are moving to standardize small cell deployment solutions. It’s not cost-effective to do custom engineering for each cell site deployment, so solutions must be based on a few standard designs that can be adapted for many different sets of technical and aesthetic requirements Manufacturers are making small cell radios, antennas, power supplies and other components as compact as possible - in order to fit inside concealment housings.
Modularity is another key. A broad selection of modular solutions is critical to ensuring successful small cell deployment, particularly in urban areas. Site components must support a wide range of deployment scenarios, including locating the radio adjacent to the antenna or placing the radio at the opposite end of a pole from an antenna.
The third ingredient is aesthetics. Cities and their residents all want the benefits of 5G services, but they don’t necessarily want to hang unsightly boxes from their streetlights or utility poles, hence the need for concealment. Many cities have their own ideas about what constitutes an acceptable concealment solution. Fortunately, manufacturers are building site concealment into their designs to ease aesthetic concerns, and have come up with a wide variety of concealment options, from streetlight poles (Figure 1) to wall-mounted enclosures disguised as street signs (Figure 2).
Figure 1: Metro cell concealment options vary widely to suit local needs. Here, the small cell is concealed in a light pole. Source: CommScope.
Figure 2: Wall-mounted small cell enclosures, like CommScope's CellSign (pictured here), may be disguised as lighting fixtures or store signs. Source: CommScope.
Finally, there’s the need for collaboration. To maximize the prospects for success, operators, municipalities, and equipment vendors should work together to share concerns and find solutions.
Concealment options
Many small cell concealment designs incorporate cell site equipment on streetlight poles that are wider at the bottom, in the middle, or at the top, depending on which look the city planners prefer. Some operators prefer top-of-pole locations to minimize loss between a bottom-mounted radio and a top-mounted antenna as well as keeping the street more available for foot traffic, for example, while others prefer bottom-pole or mid-pole locations to reduce maintenance costs.
In another example, outdoor signs can conceal a complete small cell while advertising a store or product. Some mobile operators are trying to strike deals with large franchisers to hide small cells inside their storefront signs, which has the advantage of reducing the need for city-owned infrastructure for cell placement.
5G deployments are continuing at a rapid pace, and network densification is a key requirement for providing the capacity and coverage needed in urban areas. Small cells are the solution to this need, but only if they can be made financially and aesthetically acceptable to network operators and the cities that host them. By standardizing small cell components, making them modular, developing creative financing models, and coming up with an array of concealment options that meet city standards, cities, network operators and equipment vendors are working together to enable urban 5G services.
