Telecoms.com

If we’re not complaining about poor signal in the middle of a farmers field, it’s the disastrous indoor coverage, but Ericsson is moving to soothe the masses.

One of the problems is with modern buildings. Modern building materials can block outdoor radio signals, therefore indoor coverage problems cannot be addressed by increasing outdoor radio deployments. Ericsson’s solution is to bring additional products to the market, in this case it’s the 5G Radio Dot, a small cell radio designed to improve coverage indoor ahead of the influx of the tsunami of 4K/8K video streaming, VR/AR, and immersive media which 5G promises.

“Adding small cell solutions to our 5G portfolio is a natural part of the network evolution. Enterprises have been asking for first-rate connectivity indoors, as well as higher speeds and capacity to serve advanced use cases that cannot be addressed by traditional indoor systems,” said Nishant Batra, Head of Product Area Network Infrastructure at Ericsson. “Our 5G portfolio, bolstered by small cells, will enable operators to meet these demands.”

Ericsson claims the 5G Radio Dot takes less than half the time to install compared to other indoor solutions, while it will support the new 5G mid-bands (3-6GHz) with speeds up to 2Gbps. The Radio Dot products are already in the market for customers trying to improve indoor 4G coverage, but now it has a 5G sticker on it.

The newly configured products can just replace what customers have in place now, using the same cabling infrastructure, same network architecture and dot locations. In theory, it should be a simple change over once the 5G dream is here. Trials will be taking place across 2018, and the Dot should hit the shelves in 2019.