5G small base stations are just needed or usher in a large-scale outbreak
In the 5G era, frequency bands continue to rise and application scenarios are expanding. It is estimated that more than 70% of the demand will come from indoors, which puts forward new demands on operators' indoor coverage capabilities. It is difficult for traditional macro base stations to achieve wide and deep coverage, while small base stations are much smaller in terms of product form, transmission power, and coverage, making them the best solution for indoor coverage and complementing macro base stations.
In addition to solving the problems of coverage and deployment costs, small base stations are also showing their talents in the industry private network market, MEC upper layer applications and other fields, and will become an important part of the 5G era.
Small base stations are just needed in the 5G era
4G changes life, 5G changes society. Since my country officially launched 5G commercial use last year, people are looking forward to 5G.
As we all know, 5G has the advantage of empowering thousands of industries. According to Liu Yang, a senior researcher at the 5G R&D Center of China Telecom Research Institute, it is expected that more than 70% of the business needs of the three major scenarios of 5G (including eMBB, URLLC, and mMTC) will come from indoors. . In the 5G era, after the rise of vertical industry business needs, except for some application scenarios that must be performed outdoors, such as unmanned driving, most of the other scenarios such as industrial Internet, distance education, and telemedicine come from indoors.
These business scenarios put forward some relatively high requirements for 5G indoor business requirements, which are mainly reflected in network capabilities, including transmission rate and delay. It is difficult to meet the indoor coverage requirements of 5G with 4G indoor coverage solutions. On the one hand, the deployment of the 3.5GHz frequency band will reduce the possibility of outdoor indoor coverage; on the other hand, it is also possible that passive indoor distribution is possible due to the deployment of the 3.5GHz frequency band. It cannot directly meet the needs of 5G deployment and 5G services.
In this context, the advantages of 5G small cell products will be greatly highlighted. As an effective extension of the macro base station signal, it can not only enhance indoor network coverage, but also can be combined with MEC and other technologies to provide better service capabilities for vertical industries, open up vertical industry markets, and become the best solution to achieve indoor coverage.
Small base station "big function"
Due to the higher frequency band used by 5G, which is distributed between 2515MHz-4900MHz, the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and the weaker the diffraction ability. Where there are obstacles, the radiation range will become very small. What if the radiation range is expanded by increasing the power? On the one hand, the radiation power intensity is restricted by national regulations, which means that the penetration capability is limited. On the other hand, the diffraction capability is too weak, and 5G, which is unlikely to bend when encountering obstacles, will have many blind spots.
So the "small base station" came into being, either to fill the gap of the "macro base station" or to act as a "relay" to form a complete network with comprehensive coverage. The "small base station" is compared to the traditional "macro base station". From the appearance point of view, the "body" of the small base station is smaller than that of the macro base station. Correspondingly, its transmission power and coverage are also smaller than those of macro base stations. The main function of small base stations is to "compensate blindness", covering densely populated areas that cannot be accurately reached by macro stations, and by the way solve the problem of difficult site selection for macro stations.
5G opens the market space of 100 billion small base stations
Based on the various advantages of 5G small base stations, the three major domestic operators have deployed small base stations. Among them, China Telecom is actively exploring solutions for low-cost indoor coverage in the 5G era, and has conducted field trials in multiple locations in 2019.
China Mobile has proposed a converged indoor distribution solution, which connects multiple passive indoor distribution antennas through indoor small base stations, so that it has the advantages of low cost, low power consumption, and easy expansion of traditional DAS, as well as visual operation and maintenance and flexible expansion of indoor small base stations. And other advantages.
China Unicom has planned different forms of digital room sub-products for different forms of scenarios, forming a differentiated deployment.
With the large-scale development of 5G construction, and operators actively expanding the deployment of 5G small base stations, the deployment of small base stations is about to usher in a period of large-scale development.
The market predicts that in the ultra-dense networking scenario, the interval between small base stations will be reduced to 10-20 meters (compared to the distance between macro base stations at least 500 meters), and the number of small base stations will increase significantly. Within 20%-50% of the area, the domestic 5G small base station market space will reach 65.8 billion yuan to 164.4 billion yuan. According to the latest survey by market research organization ABI Research, the global indoor small base station market will reach 1.8 billion US dollars in 2021.
