An outdoor neutral host solution at stations along the busiest commuter railway in the world has delivered remarkable results not just within the station but also within the surrounding areas.
Two years ago, neutral host company CloudExtel piloted an active shared RAN neutral host deployment at stations on Mumbai’s Western Suburban (Mumbai Local) railway, which carries 7 million passengers daily. The stations themselves are highly dense environments, with significant handover events as thousands of users – as many as 29,000 per hour at peak, move into, through and out of the main stations.
Previously, operators attempted to solve this by building macro sites around the edges of railway stations, steering one or two sectors towards the stations. But signals from nearby macro sites often overlapped, causing poor network quality, congestion, and slower data speeds.
CloudExtel’s answer was to build a dedicated shared solution providing coverage and capacity for two operators – Airtel and Vodafone Idea – inside the stations. Not only did this provide a much better solution for the platforms and station spaces, but it also offloaded a lot of traffic from the surrounding macros, enhancing user experience greatly around the station.
Now CloudExtel has released some results of its deployment, contained within a case study published this week by the Telecom Infra Project, which has recently formed a neutral host project group to facilitate commercial designs and blueprints for neutral host deployments.
CloudExtel said that the shared RAN deployment at Dadar and Churchgate stations has delivered an 18x boost in network performance, with data speeds rising from 380 Kbps to around 6.6 Mbps at surrounding macro sites. Additionally, user throughput improved to 2.7 Mbps, giving a 7x improvement in user experience on the station. The payload from MNO 1 increased from 4.9 TB to 8.1 TB per day, whereas the payload for MNO 2 rose from 4.4 TB to 7.4 TB per day.
Kunal Bajaj, CEO & Co-founder at CloudExtel and Co-chair – Neutral Host and Infra Sharing Project Group at Telecom Infra Project (TIP), told TMN that the shared infrastructure is deployed on a MORAN basis, where operators share radio equipment but control their own spectrum.
Bajaj explained: “CloudExtel deployed a shared macro BBU and multiple shared RRUs. The BBU is common for the MNOs across all the bands that we are operating in, ie 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2300 MHz. The RRUs are shared within the same frequency.
“The RRUs are catering to multiple sectors on each of the platforms at the stations for each of the MNO’s. The output of the RRUs are fed into a small passive DAS solution which distributes the signal evenly down the length of the platform, ensuring capacity where it is needed.”
Bajaj said that CloudExtel used Nokia base station and radio equipment for the solution, “given their ability to provide a scalable MORAN solution in the BBU with high power output in the radios and very high simultaneous user processing capability.”
The deployment’s MORAN architecture
A blog post from TIP said this deployment as a first in India, seeing full commercial sharing of a neutral host RAN. Like many towerco and neutral host companies, CloudExtel is majority-owned by private or non-telco ownership capital, in this case Macquarie Capital. That gives these companies access to capital on terms that mobile operators themselves would not be able to meet, and enables a different business model to their operator customers.
