How to plan and deploy an integrated in-building and urban outdoor heterogeneous network

Given that we have to use the same spectrum indoors and outdoors, a heterogeneous, indoor and outdoor network must be planned in a holistic integrated manner. Ranplan offers the only tool on the market able to support MNOs, OEMs, systems integrators and neutral hosts in the planning of an integrated in-building and urban outdoor network. Their 3D wireless modelling and simulation software helps to save time and money in network deployment, with use cases from enterprise IBS and industrial IoT, to smart cities, transportation and public safety.

The Future Network: Please introduce yourself and your company.

Ranplan Wireless is a research centric business focusing on wireless propagation, with a unique tool for planning an integrated in-building and urban outdoor wireless network. Our first suite of products was launched in 2012 and we secured our first key customers in Ericsson and Huawei. We’re now a team of around 50 people, 35 of whom remain focused on product development, with our HQ in the UK and subsidiaries in China and the USA.

I’ve been with Ranplan Wireless since 2012, having previously worked at Cambridge Broadband, Alcatel-Lucent, Lucent, and AT&T.

The Future Network: What is Ranplan’s value proposition?

We’ve developed a joint in-building and outdoor wireless planning tool. This give operators, OEMs, systems integrators and neutral hosts the opportunity to plan, simulate and predict their indoor and outdoor coverage, capacity and quality of service prior to deployment. With Ranplan’s enhanced level of accuracy, we can reduce the time taken to plan the network ahead of deployment.

Our key differentiator is our joint in-building and outdoor planning capabilities – no-one else can offer this combined functionality in a single tool. So when you’re planning a heterogeneous network, you can plan your in-building coverage in co-ordination with the outdoor environment.So we enable the densification of a single, integrated network both indoor and outdoors – critical when planning dense urban networks, such as those putting small cells in urban “canyons” or leveraging street furniture.

The Future Network: How does it work?

The way it works is that the software simultaneously models both the indoor and outdoor environments, including the complex propagation interaction between them, to provide to provide a true picture of the Heterogeneous network performance.

One of key intellectual properties is around our proprietary ray-tracing algorithm. It’s 3D based and supports multi-path rays. It supports MIMO and can accurately simulate coverage and capacity both indoors and outdoors.

The Future Network: What are the pain points that bring customers to you, and how have their requirements, and the product, evolved since 2012?

Our product suite has evolved substantially since 2012. Our proprietary 3D ray-tracing algorithm supports all frequencies from 100MHz to 60GHz, so we can can support 2G to 5G, millimeter wave spectrum, TETRA, P25, emerging IoT standards –all the technologies that fit in that spectrum range.

We follow the latest standards, and as new wireless technologies come along, we incorporate these standards into our software.

As for the pain points we’ve solved, spectrum is of course incredibly expensive. Operators use the same spectrum in both the indoors and the outdoor macro environment, so how do you plan heterogeneous networks to mitigate interference between different network layers? Ranplan’s unique tools allow the planning of in-building and urban outdoor networks and the mitigation of interference.

Spectrum management is a key focus for MNOs, hence densification and the requirement to plan and co-ordinate different layers of the heterogeneous network – macro, outdoor small cells, indoor DAS and indoor small cells – to deliver the best quality of service to the end user.

Traditionally the outdoor and indoor networks were planned in isolation, using separate tools, but now Ranplan has introduced one tool for in-building and urban outdoor environments.

The Future Network: Are Ranplan helping towercos, new market entrants focusing on IBS and small cells, and other neutral hosts increase their comfort levels with the transition from outdoor to indoor network planning and management?

The opportunity to work with towercos and other neutral hosts varies geographically.

Towercos in the U.S. have grasped the concept of urban densification and in building wireless, and are aggressively pursuing opportunities to act as neutral hosts. The business model is proven and allows a greater proliferation of in building solutions (IBS) in use cases where ROI is greater when the network is shared.

In other regions the neutral hosts or towercos have been more focused on the macro layer – towers – but I see quite a few starting to look at the in-building market and generating a profit from it. We’ve had discussions with towercos in APAC, where they’re starting to aggressively pursue that market, for example edotco is one of our customers.

The Future Network: I know Ranplan has a subsidiary and is very active in China – do you see China Tower Corporation (CTC) getting involved in IBS and small cells?

Small cells and IBS remain the province of the MNOs in China at the moment, but I can see CTC getting involved in the future. Right now our focus in China is on supporting the MNOs and OEMs such as Huawei.

The Future Network: Who do you sell your solutions to?

Our customers can be split into four brackets.

First, MNOs wanting to do their own design work, who then handover to a systems integrator to do the installation. Secondly, systems integrators using the tool to do their own designs to submit to the MNOs for approval. Thirdly, large telecom OEMs offering an end to end planning, design and installation service.

And the newest customer segment for us are neutral hosts, particularly towercos that are expanding their business model to branch out into design work and installation either for their own site planning or their clients. Within that neutral host category, we also include disruptive new market entrants focusing entirely on in-building solutions.

With 80% of mobile traffic originating or terminating in buildings, yet only 2% of commercial buildings having a dedicated wireless network, there is a huge opportunity for growth in this space.

The Future Network: Are there any recent projects that you are particularly proud of and that you are able to talk us through?

People are not just using our tool to plan

in-building wireless networks. We’re also seeing applications in planning wireless networks for transportation – underground transit networks, motorway tunnels, underground and overground railway stations.

The public safety market is moving from TETRA (and P25 in US) to LTE, which offers us another dynamic for planning networks. In a public safety context, people need to plan indoor coverage in untraditional areas such as stairwells, lifts, garages, or underground parking. The criticality of public safety networks adds complexity and strict regulatory requirements to report on when doing simulation prediction – we have an absolute appreciation of the need for critical services, not best effort services, which makes a joint indoor-outdoor planning tool like ours essential.

The Future Network: You are doing a lot of work in providing smart city solutions at the moment, and recently announced that APAC governments, operators and integrators need to take a fresh look at how they can provide ubiquitous wireless connectivity. Could you please talk us through why you see the greatest need in the APAC region?

The proliferation of smart cities across Europe and the U.S. and their emergence in Asia is another great opportunity for us.

In Europe and the U.S. in particular, the concept of municipalities wanting to rollout a smart city by providing the underlying infrastructure within a city environment on which to add applications such as smart lighting, smart metering and traffic control, while also increasing the operational efficiency of workers, and enhancing citizens’ Digital Lifestyle will be critical to attracting more corporates into that city and generating income.

Our dense urban / indoor network design enables the design of the infrastructure of a smart city before it has been physically deployed, saving time and money.

We see a great need for this in Asia. Cities like Singapore are already well advanced, other countries have a big opportunity for MNOs and municipalities to put infrastructure in. And of course there is a role for a neutral host and other new entrants in smart cities – the shared network business model may be more attractive to municipal stakeholders than for a single carrier to deploy the network.

The Future Network: IoT is also an area you cover, please could you tell us a bit about the work you are doing to facilitate connected devices?

here is a requirement for corporations to look at the automation of factories, transportation depots, et cetera, leading to the emergence of enterprises with private networks to provide coverage and capacity to enable automation and increased productivity.

Our focus is on industrial IoT, and we are gaining traction with new entrants and existing organisations that have seen a need to improve efficiency and automation. We tie the IoT to the smart cities opportunity – it’s all about putting the infrastructure in place to connect devices in the future.

For example, one of our existing customers planned the wireless network in U.S. railway depots, connecting trains and signalling and improving the operational efficiency of those depots. That infrastructure will ensure trains leave and arrive on time, reducing losses in heavy goods transportation.

The Future Network: And finally, how do you see the future of cellular networks evolving?

Cellular network evolution is driven by the explosion in mobile data traffic – not just from human consumers but ubiquitous networks carrying voice and data, providing connectivity to humans, machines, and enabling automation.

From this has arisen the concept of delivering open standard cellular networks that carry traffic across these ubiquitous markets. While the evolution of standards continues to drive new technologies, we must strive to move from disparate to totally integrated networks.