Texas Instruments (TI), and Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN), the world's specialist in mobile broadband, announced their collaboration on NSN's next generation of indoor small cell base stations. Based on NSN's Flexi Zone suite of products, the new indoor small cell base stations are expected to support a record 400 active indoor users, compared to 32 users supported today, in a power over Ethernet envelope. Furthermore, by utilizing TI's KeyStone SoCs to power the next generation indoor FlexiZone small cells, NSN is able to offer a macro parity leading solution.
"From our in depth discussions with service providers, we understand how critical it is for suppliers like TI to facilitate interoperability between outdoor macro cells, outdoor small cells and indoor small cells," said Troy Coleman, Product Line Manager, Small Cell Base Stations, Texas Instruments. "By selecting our KeyStone SoCs across a range of wireless infrastructure products, NSN is effectively addressing the operators' needs with a high performance, low power solution enabling scalability and interoperability across platforms."
NSN's new Flexi Zone base stations are the industry's smallest indoor and outdoor micro/pico cells and provide the same capacity and features as macro-cellular base stations, offering 30% lower overall total cost of ownership than conventional small cells and providing much improved performance thanks to advanced HetNet coordination and interference management features.
"Flexi Zone range of small cells are the industry first indoor and outdoor small cells to offer full software macro parity, enabling the deployment of high performance HetNet that lower total cost of ownership while offering significant capacity to deal with hot spots, hot zones or provide indoor services for multiple operators' subscribers," said Randy Cox, head of Small Cells product management at NSN. "By leveraging the programmability of TI's KeyStone SoCs we are able to offer a much reduced total cost of ownership as the macro software parity makes it easier for operators to tightly couple the macro and small cell network layers hence better manage interference, simplify interoperability, and reduce operations and maintenance impact."