Thursday School : Special Coverage Infrastructure & Data Centres

Delivering a once in a lifetime special event requires all the stops to be pulled out. London 2012 Olympics were based around a number of outdoor water-sports locations, some indoor stadia, but most importantly the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park in Stratford, London.

There was a key demand to maximise the mobile experience and several years of planning went into mobile coverage and capacity planning alone.

I was responsibility for capacity design, ordering and delivery of Vodafone’s Ericsson equipment to a 1MW Data Centre, called the BTS Hotel, hidden behind the Organising Committee (LOCOG) offices, and the world’s biggest McDonalds!

Put simply it was a very large scale (over 200 sectors carrying #2G and #3G signals from all 4 UK MNOs plus Emergency Services) RF over Fibre Digital DAS. All the Radio Access Network Equipment was in the 2 floor Data Centre, inputting into the DAS Head End Equipment.

This distributed the signals over fibre around the entire park. The distances are quite large – about 1Km from the Data Centre to the Velopark – so transferring the signals digitally over fibre was the only viable way. Using traditional feeders from the BTS Hotel would have been both wasteful – most of the signal would have been lost in the cables – and poor performance.

Within each arena, Digital Remote Radios transmitted the signals to over 10 million sports fans from antennas hidden in the roof spaces. The main Stadium was divided into 40+ sectors.

The high level system components are shown below. Traditional Macro (wide area coverage) base-stations were used (cooled by massive noisy fans) connecting into a set of DAS Head Ends. These converted the information to Digital, Fibres were then routed to each arena, where the fibres were split out to reach each Remote Radio which then transmitted the signal via narrow-beam antennas covering typically less than 2000 people each.  

The Data Centre (& LOCOG offices, McDonalds and Corporate Hospitality which surrounded them) are long since demolished.

But the ability to deploy RAN baseband/DAS many hundred metres or even miles from where coverage is needed has been refined and is the stalwart of Indoor and Outdoor Neutral Host Coverage today.

You need a partner who can provide you with Data Centre locations within <20Km fibre distance of almost any town or enterprise in the UK and who has the experience and knowledge of remote CPRI, DAS and OpenRAN installs!

There are significant pooling and efficiency gains below are a few recent posts which give some context.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulrhodes_small-cells-delivering-the-test-bed-for-activity-7081215193845751808-BN3m

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulrhodes_a-new-blog-on-an-old-problem-indoor-5g-and-activity-7069796292897439744-bpro

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulrhodes_content-disaggregated-pooled-activity-7064147954428698624-ZlEh

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulrhodes_edge-disaggregated-mec-activity-7056258286559358976-bLBI

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Previous Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulrhodes_4g-5g-everydaysaschoolday-activity-7097823039366524929-3wLr