Alcatel-Lucent Introduces Compact Cellular Base Stations

Alcatel-Lucent yesterday unveiled its new development - compact base station modules, stating that this technology "will complete the era of base stations and cell phone towers, as we know it today." Of course, PR managers are able and love to make statements of this kind, but the lightRadio ™ base stations really deserve to be noticed: they look quite unusual, and the scheme of their work is quite interesting. So, the module itself is a small cube with a rib length of only five centimeters.

The module replaces a complex of different antennas used in 2G, 3G and 4G networks, and work as a single unit using a set of additional equipment. By the way, the communication range is set for each module separately, programmatically. The operating frequency range of the “cube” includes the spectrum from 400 MHz to 4 GHz.
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The module is connected to the additional hardware via fiber-optic cable, and the entire system works as a single unit thanks to the involved "cloud" technology from HP. Several antenna modules in a single bundle can provide a sufficiently large coverage area. Incidentally, the technology also uses a new compression technology, this is provided by the Freescale chip.

According to the developers, the entire system is much cheaper, and of course, more compact than its counterparts. Saving carrier when implementing such modules instead of the usual base stations can be 50%. In addition, it promises to improve the quality of communication for ordinary users - such “cubes” are planned to be placed everywhere.

A full description of the technology is here .