It's not just about LTE, vendor says
Nokia Siemens Networks has launched its Flexi Multiradio Base Station, a new version of its Flexi product.
So what's new about it? Well Marc Rouanne, head of the company's radio access business, said that it is the first time the company has made all the GSM and 3GPP family of air interfaces available through a software upgrade. That means that operators can now, on the same hardware platform, define in software which air interfaces to support, meaning that it is backwards compatible to 2G as well as forward to 4G.
But hasn't Nokia Siemens, like most vendors, always trumpeted its ability to offer 3G and 4G evolutions available as a software upgrade? "Yes, but not GSM," Rouanne said. "There is now a view that because of spectrum re-farming and other issues, GSM is going to be around for a long time," he said. "Flexi Multiradio gives operators the ability add GSM coverage to the same hardware and management platforms as their W-CDMA and LTE coverage, in all frequency bands and variants."
Although Rouanne didn't say so, adding GSM to the integrated RAN approach adds Nokia Siemens to a list that includes Ericsson and Huawei. The theoretical benefits of the integrated approach are that operators can backhaul all their traffic over the same IP Ethernet connection, without having a pipe for each standard supported. They can also add their GSM base stations to the same network management systems.
Rouanne said that although the product has already shipped to some operators who are in trial, he didn't expect the company to start shipping the product in volume until 2010. This is presumably in lines with operators' plans to upgrade to LTE, although Rouanne was adamant that he didn't see the product as only a solution to meet LTE demand.
"It's Flexi," he said, "it's the solution that meets the challenge of increasing data growth on the networks of the top tier operators. Operators are going to use it everywhere. It might be HSPA or LTE. LTE is for us an evolution, it's coming, and everything we ship will be LTE enabled, so what's the debate?"
Well, the debate has been about whether to deploy LTE as a discreet overlay, giving a lower cost of entry, but higher operational costs, or go for a multi-RAN approach. The debate is very much about whether to invest in the new radio interface, with all the implications that has for device portfolios, network optimisation and planning.
Rouanne said operators are faced with a great boom in data usage, and the Flexi product gives them a power efficient, and network efficient, way of meeting those challenges in the best way they see fit.
But can Nokia Siemens really afford to be so relaxed about whether operators choose to deploy LTE or not? After all, the vendor has invested heavily in R&D to give it the ability to cover the new OFDM and MIMO technologies that LTE uses. Surely it needs a payback on that investment?
"We need to find a way to deliver them this hundred times growth in traffic with the most efficiency, so naturally we'll go to LTE as we see the demand increases," Rouanne said. "But our discussions are about optimising the network efficiency in the best way," he added.