China Mobile deploys LTE small cell backhaul

Chinese operator China Mobile has deployed a self-organising small cell microwave backhaul system in its LTE network to provide improved coverage and capacity to subscribers in densely populated urban areas.

The world’s largest operator with 747 million subscribers as of September 2013, according to Informa’s WCIS service, launched its TD-LTE network in December last year and said it will continue rolling the network out across the country to reach more than half a  million TD-LTE base stations by the end of this year.

The operator called on small cells solutions vendor Cambridge Communication Systems (CCS) to provide the equipment for the deployment. The vendor’s self-organising backhaul nodes, together with a single or dual small cell, connect to others to create a multipoint to multipoint network that self-organises into the most optimal topology, according to CCS.

The vendor added that China Mobile’s network will be able to provide high capacity, low latency, carrier-class availability and high QoS to its LTE small cells. The technology has already been implemented and is now carrying live LTE traffic in China.

“This is a highly significant deployment for CCS, which demonstrates the unrivalled technical and business benefits that our solution is delivering to the world’s largest mobile network operator,” said CCS CEO Steve Greaves.

“Our self-organising, self-healing nodes are able to be very swiftly and flexibly deployed by relatively untrained contractors – without any upfront frequency planning or optimisation – saving both time and money while delivering the high levels of capacity, latency and redundancy demanded by China Mobile.”

LTE Asia 2014 takes place on the 23rd to 25th September at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore.