HOW TO CRACK MASSIVE PLUS

In high enough volume, it is these customized chips, designed for an individual purpose, that make the Tier 1 equipment vendors so proficient in massive MIMO. Commenting anonymously, one analyst said access to cutting-edge semiconductors has never been so important in radio.Д«oth Ericsson and Huawei have used what are known as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) in their radio designs. Ericsson itself hailed advances within Ericsson Silicon, its in-house chips division, when explaining its latest improvements.

He is not the only one who recognizes that advantage. The key advantage these Tier 1 vendors hold is their custom silicon, and the volume of business to justify their investments in it, says Hynes. In the same week that Ericsson unveiled its 20-kilogram unit, Huawei boasted one that weighs just 19 kilograms, knocking 6 kilograms off its predecessor. That difference promises a huge reduction in deployment and energy costs for service providers. Ericsson has recently been shouting about a 64T64R unit that weighs only 20 kilograms, about 45% less than its older model.

HOW TO CRACK MASSIVE PLUS

On the plus side, this creates a bigger opportunity for open RAN players. 'The addressable market is increasing because the price-performance ratio on massive MIMO base stations is improving.' 'The number of locations that can benefit from massive MIMO is going up,' says Gabriel Brown, a principal analyst with Heavy Reading, a sister company to Light Reading. Even now, massive MIMO is understood to feature at 90% of Vodafone's 5G sites in the UK вЂ“ a deployment, it should be noted, that has focused on urban areas initially. It will be needed to cope with soaring levels of data consumption on 5G networks. Unfortunately, massive MIMO cannot simply be overlooked like a soccer team's predilection for scoring lots of goals rather than defending against a few. Massive MIMO, they worry, is an Achilles heel вЂ“ 'a difficult thing for open RAN to crack,' in the words of Yago Tenorio, Vodafone's head of network strategy.Д®ricsson's radio equipment sited on a rooftop. Some operators hope it can vanquish the monolithic system, where everything is provided by a giant vendor like Ericsson or Huawei.

What chance, then, for smaller companies touting 'open RAN,' including Benetel? The disruptive technology promises new interfaces allowing components from one supplier to speak with products from another. As in other big-league sports, opportunity has tended to favor those with multi-billion-dollar budgets. 'You are driving huge digital signal processing as well as radio processing on the mast, and that is a whole new game,' says Alan Hynes, the director of engineering for Benetel, an Irish maker of radio equipment. It is regarded by experts as one of the toughest challenges in 5G radio. The elite can now churn these out in boxes that weigh about the same as a six-year-old child. While radios in widespread use might each include just a couple of transmitters and receivers, a high-end massive MIMO unit can pack 64 of them (so-called 64T64R). Massive MIMO, as the name implies, is the big league of radio, a place of macho posturing about performance, where players flaunt their specs and records are set.

How to crack massive