Dual-Mode Small Cells Perform Well in Tests

June 11, 2014

By J. Sharpe Smith —

More than 90 percent of enterprises with more than 500 employees will pay significantly more for a small-cell system that not only provides cellular service but also managed services, such as mobile device management, context/location-aware services, Wi-Fi-as-a-service, hosted unified communications, cloud and PBX integration, according to iGR Research.

Haraldsvik

In order to provide those types services, operators are demanding small cells with certain key performance indicators (KPIs). To wit, SpiderCloud’s SCRN-310 dual-band 3G/LTE Radio Node has performed admirably during ongoing LTE trials with mobile operators, according to Ronny Haraldsvik, senior vice president, SpiderCloud.

The new LTE small cell trials show performance reliability results, which are consistent with similar 3G small cell test results SpiderCloud achieved a year ago. The average call setup success rate was 99.5 percent, the call drop rate was 0.4 percent, the intra-E-RAN hand-over success rate was 99.9 percent and the downlink average throughput was 56.5 Mbps.

“These KPIs are everything that is important to an operator from a perspective of 3G and 4G RAN small cell characteristics,” Haraldsvik told AGL Small Link. “These types of performance metrics we achieved mean that we can pretty much provide wireline-comparable services.”

While SpiderCloud introduced an LTE-only small cell more than a year ago, the SCRN-310 was announced last fall. The dual-mode unit supports 32 3G/HSPA+ channels, 32 active LTE users and 128 LTE connected users, as well as Voice over LTE (VoLTE). It can be software-upgraded to support two bands of LTE.

is a dual-mode unit that provides 3G and 4G on two different bands in the same radio node, which can be software upgraded to be dual-band LTE.

Vodafone is currently deploying 3G radio nodes in Fortune 1000 companies in the United Kingdom, the largest of which has 3,000 employees in the facility, but is expected to begin SCRN-310 soon. The dual-band node is also commercially shipping in the United States.

The first model of SCRN-310 operate in the 1900 MHz and in the AWS band and the second will operate at 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz. Support for additional band classes is planned for the second half of 2014.