China Unicom and Huawei announced the development of their joint 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO solution, which applies 5G Massive MIMO technology indoors to significantly grow capacity.
According to Huawei, new infrastructure requirements released by the Chinese government in March require 5G networks. This will be able to provide wider indoor coverage and stronger capabilities to accelerate applications in industries and support the exploration of new business models.
The 5G Indoor Distributed Massive MIMO solution is developed based on Huawei’s 5G LampSite Digital Indoor System.
Huawei describes it as: “Through dynamic coordination among multiple digital indoor head ends, the capacity on indoor networks becomes scalable, self-adapting to changes in data traffic. In addition, compared with the cell splitting approach, both interference and manual commissioning costs are significantly reduced, while also effectively increasing 5G indoor spectral efficiency.
In the U.S., the government has announced that it will ban Huawei as it poses a security threat. Tier 2 and 3 carriers are in the midst of figuring out how to replace their Huawei equipment.
Massive MIMO has been a big part of the 5G strategy for Sprint. However, their merger with T-Mobile closed on April 1. Sprint was able to deploy it using its 2.5 GHz spectrum and gear from Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung.
Dell’Oro Group analyst Stefan Pongratz said it is likely that the massive MIMO business will take some time before it starts to make sense for indoor applications.
“There is no doubt that the transceiver density will continue to grow over time for both outdoor and indoor systems,” he said via email. “But one of the key reasons the outdoor Massive MIMO business case has been so compelling for mid-band deployments is that it enables the operators to leverage their existing 4G macro grid without adding additional sites – the coverage component is a significant part of the business case.”
Chris Nicoll of ACG Research said that there’s a narrow market opportunity for Massive MIMO in indoor coverage, but that narrow opportunity is critical. Indoor private networks, particularly for shop floor automation and robotic control is where Massive MIMO indoors provides the best performance for (URLLC) applications.
The real challenge however, is the cost of what these M-MIMO antennas cost. It has been reported that 64×64 will be the optimal setting for outdoor M-MIMO. 16×16 or 32×32 will be the optimal setting for indoor M-MIMO. This could benefit Ericsson/Kathrein.