Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled lightRadio, what it is describing as a breakthrough in mobile and broadband infrastructure that both streamlines and radically simplifies mobile networks. The new lightRadio system dramatically reduces technical complexity and contains power consumption and other operating costs in the face of sharp traffic growth. This is accomplished by taking base stations and cell site towers and radically shrinking and simplifying them.
The lightRadio technology represents a new architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each cell site tower, is broken into its components elements and then distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network. Antennas serving 2G, 3G, and LTE systems are combined and shrunk into a single powerful, multi frequency, multi standard Wideband Active Array Antenna that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection. The new lightRadio product family, of which initial elements ready to begin customer trials in the second half 2011, reduces energy consumption of mobile networks by up to 50% over current radio access network equipment. Also, lightRadio provides an alternative to today’s jungle of large overcrowded cell site towers by enabling small antennas anywhere. By reducing the cell site to just the antenna and leveraging future advances in microwave backhaul and compression techniques, the technology will enable the easy creation of broadband coverage virtually anywhere there is power (electricity, sun, wind) by using microwave to connect back to the network.
Due to lightRadio’s impact on site, energy, operations and maintenance costs; when combined with small cells and LTE, this new solution can lead to a reduction of total cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile networks up to 50%. Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, said: “lightRadio is a smart solution to a tough set of problems: high energy costs, the explosion of video on mobile, and connecting the unconnected.” Alcatel-Lucent is in advanced planning with China Mobile as well as a number of other carriers around the globe around co-creation and field trials of the lightRadio solution. Company studies have concluded that the total addressable opportunity for the multi-technology radio market, which lightRadio addresses, will be over 12 billion Euros in 2014, representing more than 55% of the total wireless RAN market. The cumulative total addressable market will be over 100 billion Euros from 2011-2018.
