Alcatel-Lucent have unveiled their solution to cell phone towers, called lightRadio. The lightRadio units are far smaller than existing cellular towers, being just about large enough to fit into the palm of someone’s hand.
lightRadio has already been tested for coverage and energy usage improvements and could pave the way for cheaper expansion of cellular coverage due to its far smaller size and cheaper installation costs.
Alcatel-Lucent have explained how the lightRadio unit is constructed as follows: “This is accomplished by creating a new architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each cell tower, is broken into its component elements and distributed through the network or ‘carrier cloud.’ Additionally the various cell tower antennas are combined and shrunk into a single powerful, Bell Labs-pioneered multi frequency, multi standard (2G, 3G, LTE) device that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.”
Source: ITNewsAfrica