Wireless Updates December 11, 2015

Small Cells and DAS

Ericsson and Kathrein put the small cells at your feet, actually below your feet. Is that really where you want them? I get it from a coverage perspective, but do you really want a manhole radiating below you, just a thought.

Broadband News

Dish gets 3GPP approval to use band 66. What this means is that now they can use it for LTE, and it is a lot of spectrum, let me tell you. They can also use carrier aggregation to pair with the AWS spectrum. Band 66 includes AWS-1 spectrum (band 4).Dish also has AWS-4. Now they have an unbalanced spectrum pair, which is pretty cool. They have 70MHz of uplink with 90MHz of downlink which is awesome! AWS-1 = 1710 to 1755MHz and 2110 to 2155MHz, AWS-3 = 1755 to 1780MHz with 2155 to 2180MHz along with AWS-4 spectrum of 2180 to 2200MHz. But wait, there is more, Band H also approved, AWS-3 includes 1695 to 1710MHz, AWS-4 includes 2000 to 2020MHz and H block includes 1995 to 2000MHz. That is a lot of spectrum, what will they do with it all? I hope they deploy someday!

Frontier needs to invest $150M in broadband development in Virginia!

Drones

Are you a fan of GoPro? I am, they have cool cameras and promotions. Well, guess what, now they have drones! They are getting ready to launch their first drone in 2016, how cool is that? They are naming it “Karma”. DJI will make the drone for them with the GoPro cameras on board. Now, if only the FAA will define what the industry has to do to officially use these at the tower site and for microwave paths, how cool would that be? I think it will change the way we do things in the industry. No, it won’t replace tower climbers but it should reduce climbs, right? It should allow us to have one guy go out and do a close out package, and save on climbing more than we need to.