Introduction

Mobile operators around the world have spent billions of dollars to ensure access to their networks in virtually every scenario. These capital expenditures have been committed to ensure a “five 9s” type level of service. This objective becomes even more important when portable cell sites known as CoWs and CoLTs are deployed in the case of special events, disaster recovery or when temporary additional capacity is required for whatever purpose. These units are typically deployed in unpredictable and basically unknown environments. Factors such as high-power adjacent RF energy, co-channel interference from unknown sources and other carriers operating with reduced guard bands all limit the performance of these temporary cell sites.

Uplink interference is a real problem that can severely impact the performance of the network and, when it comes to CoW and CoLT deployments, there is often simply not enough time to engage in the traditional uplink RF interference hunting activity to determine the sources of interference and then enact counter measures.

Network operators can now include spectrum conditioning with RF digital signal processing to ensure optimal CoW and CoLT performance. This new white paper gives examples of how interference affects spectrum utilization, capacity and performance in ad hoc situations and, more importantly, it provides data on actual improvements in various scenarios after implementing spectrum conditioning.

“We were called upon recently to provide spectrum conditioning at a major sports event to help the operator maximize its network capacity and quality of service,” said Tim Hall, VP of North American Sales for ISCO International. “As in similar situations, our customer knew that unpredictable usage patterns, RF environment and multiple service providers competing for spectrum could negatively impact their subscribers’ experience. By counting on ISCO to mitigate the effects of interference and adjacent RF energy, they eliminated a significant worry.”

As with the ISO 7-layer stack model in wireline networks, where layers 2 through 7 depend on a solid layer 1 (physical layer), spectrum conditioning assures a solid RF physical layer so that upper layers of the wireless call process, including the application layer, can work as designed.