With the advent of 5G, the use of new room subsystems will become an industry trend

With the rapid growth of the scale of 4G users, the continuous innovation of mobile applications, and the continuous reduction of operators' traffic tariffs, the traffic carried by mobile networks has shown a trend of geometric growth in recent years, and more and more of them have begun. Appear indoors, which puts forward an urgent need for operators to enhance indoor coverage.

As the operator with the largest number of mobile users, China Mobile deeply understands the importance of improving indoor network coverage. As early as 2016, it issued the "Guiding Opinions on China Mobile's Indoor Coverage Construction", and has carried out multiple indoor coverage antennas and base stations. Deployment to gradually improve indoor network coverage. At present, the commercialization of 5G is approaching, and China Mobile is also intensively conducting research and preparations for indoor network coverage in the 5G era.

In terms of indoor coverage, traditional DAS solutions and new room sub-solutions (distributed PicoRRU) are generally used in the industry. In the early stage of 4G construction, China Mobile's network adopted the traditional DAS solution. However, it is undeniable that traditional DAS has problems such as difficulty in fault discovery, fault location, fault supervision, and fault analysis.

Facing a large number of room sub-scenarios, the visualized operation and maintenance of room sub-systems is particularly important. Due to inherent deficiencies, traditional room sub-systems can only passively troubleshoot, that is, after a failure occurs, only customers complaining to the operator will know and troubleshoot. There is no way to know. Therefore, in the case of traditional room distribution, operators usually face a large number of network coverage complaints, and in places where devices are damaged but no one complains, users will switch to other communication methods, which means that user traffic is reduced and operations The profit of the business is impaired.

Visualized operation and maintenance is exactly the advantage of the new room division scheme represented by PicoRRU. Taking the new digital room as an example, the solution has visual operation and maintenance capabilities, supports cell division and expansion, and supports 4T4R and indoor positioning capabilities. In practice, China Mobile’s provincial branches have found that visualized operation and maintenance can bring two benefits: First, it saves troubleshooting costs and can significantly reduce labor costs. It usually takes only half a day to deal with faults in the digital room. It usually takes two or three days to troubleshoot problems when problems occur; secondly, there is no need to send people to on-site inspections after visualized operation and maintenance, which greatly reduces inspection costs.

In view of the inherent deficiencies of DAS and the advantages of new solutions, China Mobile began to introduce new PicoRRU solutions on a large scale in the middle and late stages of 4G network construction. With the arrival of 5G in the future, the use of new room sub-systems will become an industry trend.

In addition to visualized operation and maintenance, the new indoor sub-system has two advantages: first, it improves operators’ big data capabilities and opens up new revenue channels; second, it achieves more accurate indoor positioning, enabling more business applications and business models become possible. For example, combined with positioning capabilities, operators can develop services such as smart parking and red envelope access.

Industry experts believe that in the future 5G era, as the unit price of traffic continues to decrease, big data and positioning capabilities become more and more important to operators, and may even become an opportunity for operators to turn over.

Different from outdoor coverage, indoor scenes are complex and diverse, and the specific demands of different scenes are different. Currently, the industry generally divides indoor coverage scenarios into three types.

First, the value scenes of transportation hubs such as universities, airports, and stadiums have high requirements for traffic and quality. They are the key construction scenes of China Mobile. These scenes are divided into new rooms.

Second, office buildings, shopping malls, and hotels account for the largest proportion of such scenarios, and they also gather high-value customers. New digital room distribution will also become a growth trend.

Third, residential areas. Regardless of whether DAS or PicoRRU is used, since people often use Wi-Fi when they go out during the day and go home at night, the benefits of this scenario are limited and comprehensively weighed. This type of scenario should adopt an outdoor + indoor solution. Of course, in the 5G era, with the increase in network speed and the popularization of unlimited tariff packages, users will also use mobile data networks more at home, making the situation change. Facing the future, the coverage of residential buildings has a long way to go.

In addition, subway tunnels also require special environments, for which operators generally adopt a combination of active and passive.

China Mobile has introduced digital room distribution solutions on a large scale in the middle and late stages of 4G networks. For 5G, it is expected that the usage of digital room distribution will gradually increase and the price will gradually decrease. 5G will be the best time for the popularization of indoor digital solutions.