Prior to the deployment, despite very good macro coverage available outside the building, signal penetration indoors had been limited, resulting in poor network coverage and capacity. Following the deployment, mobile subscribers now enjoy data speeds of up to 10 Mb/s even during busy office hours, higher voice quality and virtually no dropped calls. The building where LampSite has been successfully activated totals 12,000 square meters over four floors and receives up to 1,100 employees and visitors a day.
The development of the LampSite solution deployed in the Huawei UK headquarters was a joint effort between Vodafone and Huawei technology innovation teams. The LampSite system is designed to be extremely scalable and flexible, and is easy to deploy and manage – so in-building networks can be deployed in a few days instead of a few months. LampSite also offers operators the capability to provide their subscribers with a best-in-class user experience indoors that can also help enterprises increase business productivity with more seamless mobile communication.
“We are totally aligned with our customer’s Enterprise market needs,” said Zhang Xiangjun, President of Huawei’s small cell product line, during a workshop. “This solution is designed with the technology and business requirements of major operators in mind, and is the result of an important joint innovation.”
LampSite provides comprehensive in-building mobile network coverage starting with an array of small radio access units (pRRUs) installed on the ceiling on every floor of an office building. The pRRUs are connected with Ethernet cables to rHUB (radio hub) units, which provide the pRRUs with power and aggregate the traffic that they generate. A single standard BBU (baseband unit) that can be connected to an outside macro coverage area provides the in-building network with the required radio resources to realize a No-Edge network experience indoors as well as outdoors.