In advance of Mobile World Congress, Nokia has announced two new additions to its AirScale small cells portfolio that extend the high performance of 5G both indoors and outdoors and support a wide range of use cases.

A compact millimeter wave (mmWave) radio offers cost-effective 5G outdoor coverage of extremely high traffic areas such as airports, stadiums and busy pedestrian zones.

In addition, a new 5G pico Remote Radio Head for the Nokia AirScale Indoor Radio System enables an upgrade of indoor coverage to 5G without replacing installed hardware, even in complex buildings such as hospitals and shopping malls.

Ubiquitous 5G connectivity requires deploying high-band mmWave for ultra-high capacity but limited coverage and deploying lower bands for wider coverage with lower capacity. As operators densify their networks to meet the extreme capacity requirements of a variety of use cases, it is critical to deploy the appropriate small cell technology to ensure reliable 5G performance.

Mark Atkinson, head of 5G and small cells of Nokia, says: “Small cells are perfectly suited for using 5G mmWave and mid-bands to deliver very high capacity to support the busiest traffic areas and ensure subscribers always enjoy the highest quality services. We are building on our small cells leadership to enable operators to deploy almost any scenario of 4G indoor and outdoor capacity and coverage that can be upgraded to 5G New Radio using a choice of spectrum bands.”

The new 5G AirScale mmWave Radio supports 28 GHz and 39 GHz bands to provide extreme high-capacity for the busiest traffic locations.

* Compact, high-power small cell offers a range of deployment options for easy installation.

* Allows 180-degree, 360-degree and multi-band deployments to provide flexible coverage that meets mmWave radio signal attenuation challenges.

* Support for eCPRI connectivity to a distributed data center provides high capacity fronthaul.

* Can be flexible to support baseband unit functionality using a modular compact component.

The new 5G pico Remote Radio Head supports sub-6 GHz to provide 5G coverage and capacity in busy indoor locations.

* Operators can upgrade existing installations to 5G simply by attaching 5G pico Remote Radio Heads directly to the AirScale smart HUB and by daisy-chaining them with existing legacy technology pico Remote Radio Heads.

* Deployable on an existing Distributed Antenna System.

* High 4 x 250 mW output power for a wide coverage area.

* New dual port Ethernet extender allows pico Remote Radio Heads to be located up to 200m away from the smart HUB for even greater deployment flexibility.