Alcatel-Lucent | Planning and Deploying the 3G/UMTS Network
3G,
Alcatel-Lucent,
Deployment,
Planning,
RF,
UMTS
The telecommunications marketplace is changing rapidly, placing increasing emphasis on providing consumers with personalized lifestyle services and mobility. There has been an explosion in the availability of sophisticated user devices that support integrated voice, data, and video applications. According to a UMTS Forum white paper, at the end of 2006 consumers had a choice of more than 400 WCDMA terminal designs worldwide representing handsets optimized for voice, video, and other multimedia services.1 UMTS also estimates that worldwide 3G subscribers will exceed 275 million by the end of 2007. By the end of the decade, the total of global 3G WCDMA subscribers should approach 800 million.
Driving consumer acceptance and increased demand are new features such as high resolutions screens, multi-megapixel cameras with quality optics, fast USB and WiFI connectivity, and large amounts of removable storage capacity such as compact flash, memory sticks, and other formats that can store gigabytes of music, pictures, and videos. The business market is equally active with handsets equipped with business-oriented operating systems, keyboards for text entry, and PDA handhelds that are moving into the territory that was once exclusively held by notebook PCs. 3G/UMTS will make possible a whole new range of mobile data applications such as telemedicine, electronic banking, and location-based services.
Mobile TV, video, and music are three hot new services. Better phones with high resolution screens featuring large color palettes, combined with improved power management, are helping drive the demand for mobile TV, a premiere applications based on 3G/UMTS-based services. Mobile video is another killer application — witness the number of video clips created on mobile devices that are posted daily to YouTube. And mobile music — downloading songs to your mobile device — although currently accounting for only a small percentage of service provider ARPU, is growing rapidly.
All of this activity presents service providers with great opportunities — and some formidable challenges as well.
Alcatel-Lucent studies indicate that customers are increasingly looking to bundle their various communications services and have no qualms about switching if their provider is unable to offer a whole range of new 3G services backed up by high levels of quality of service (QoS). This means service providers have to present their subscribers with a top notch service experience and QoS for content-based services, while, at the same time, re-engineering their operations to significantly increase service velocity. To achieve this goal they must be able to cost-effectively manage the migration to 3G/UMTS.
Planning and Deploying the 3G/UMTS Network
In order to take advantage of the rapidly growing market for new converged mobile services, operators need to not only deploy UMTS, but to make sure that the 3G service is integrated with its existing 2G GSM network. In working with its service provider customers, Alcatel-Lucent has employed a variety of techniques to bring their UMTS clusters (a group of 20~25 contiguous NodeBs) to acceptable performance status within a significantly compressed time line. Key areas addressed by he deployment teams include:
• RF Design;
• RNC planning and configuration;
• Initial neighbor list – UMTS;
• Initial neighbor list – IRAT; and
• Drive route and cluster definition and 3rd party audit of antenna installation
RF Design
Fundamental to a successful UMTS deployment is an excellent design that has as its foundation high quality geographic data and accurate signal propagation models. Developing the right propagation models is essential — failure to do so can compromise the entire deployment. 3G networks demand rigorous precision;
A hefty percentage of the initial design time — in some cases, a month or longer — can be expended in identifying the right sites in the target market area. This essential preliminary work includes gathering, sorting, and tuning data in order to simulate actual market conditions in the target area and develop accurate propagation models assigned to the appropriate cells or sectors in both the 3G and 2G spectrums. Continuous wave (CW) tests performed over both spectrums (for example, at 1900 and 850 MHz) ensure the validity of the UMTS and GSM propagation models.
