In an era where seamless indoor connectivity is pivotal, Proptivity emerges as a trailblazing radio infrastructure provider for commercial properties, addressing the escalating challenge of indoor connectivity by delivering small cell indoor access solutions.
TowerXchange speaks with Morgan Curby, Chief Marketing Officer, about what is driving developments of small cell inbuilding, how Proptivity supports building owners to leverage indoor connectivity, and why small cells need to be the future of inbuilding networks.
TowerXchange: Please introduce your company
Morgan Curby, CMO, Proptivity:
Simply put, we are a radio access infrastructure provider servicing commercial properties, providing high performance 5G indoor connectivity infrastructure for commercial properties, in a neutral host model.
Proptivity started from Stronghold Invest which provides a host of property-related services, for example owning Europe’s largest property management company, and during their conversations with their commercial teams they saw a lot of problems from property owners getting indoor connectivity and this has gotten worse over time. Proptivity was created with the aim to be an effective way for property owners to secure future proof indoor 5G, in a straightforward “as a service” package with an even simpler everything included pricing.
We have started in Sweden but have now established a Norwegian entity and are quickly moving into rest of Nordic, with discussions to enter selected EU markets on the horizon, and all this in just over a year. There is huge interest in our high performance 5G indoor solution, maybe not so much because tenants need gigabit indoor speeds everywhere today but due to that everyone can easily see that this is the future we are quickly moving towards.
The model is quite easy to replicate and there are a lot of buildings that need our high performance indoor 5G solution. A grade-A building already today requires a good indoor mobile coverage, and this is where the first big target segment is; it’s already a market, but today they most often build with older low capacity passive solutions.
Over time more tenants will require that their buildings have high performance indoor connectivity so eventually grade B and then C buildings will also need to be upgraded in the future. Other buildings like warehouses and factories also need indoor coverage but this is more specific situation where private 5G networks can play a role. However, our focus is on bringing all public MNOs into buildings.
Technologies such as mobile pay mean it’s critical that commercial buildings have good connectivity; it’s a window into any consumer day. Wifi has always been considered the solution for this but that’s just not possible anymore. People don’t log in to public or commercial wifi; in Sweden it’s only around 4% and mostly young people. If you want to access customers, or allow them to easily access their digital tools, you need to give them coverage without any thresholds.
TowerXchange: What are the key factors driving demand for 4G and 5G in-building solutions?
Morgan Curby, CMO, Proptivity:
If you take a passive solution like Distributed Antenna System (DAS) which is still being installed today it gives you about 0.05MB per second per square meter. A phone call can be up to 0.1MB per second as it’s all done with data, which means that a caller will need around 2sqm of capacity, while a video call in HD will eat up capacity around 20-30 sqm. So, the question is how many people do you want your indoor network to work for? This is becoming a real bottleneck, especially in retail, as you need capacity everywhere to support the huge data consumption rates in busy areas.
Even with a modern DAS you are restricted in capacity because you are sharing a single base station across the entire space of the building. In offices, people are constantly on their phones and companies are starting to ask employees not to use the wifi for phone connectivity to avoid overloads.
These low-capacity networks can’t meet capacity needs from modern users and I haven’t even included all the new technologies that will put further pressure on capacity over time. There are plenty of inbuilding deployments in offices and retail, you can’t do a modern building without inbuilding solutions (IBS) today, but capacity is the driving force for the next stage, and installing small cells will solve this pure capacity problem.
We have colleagues in Asia who are working on IBS and the US has been a trailblazer for CBRS solutions, but many IBS are still using passive coax cables. Indoor coverage is happening, but it’s mostly being done on low-capacity IBS. If you want to upgrade these to high capacity it will be a super complex process, very expensive and likely not practical. Most of today’s small cells are also single-tenant and fully neutral shared outdoor active infrastructure deployments is limited. So currently these networks are either single-operator deployments or not “real” 5G capacity infrastructure.
TowerXchange: What is the process for upgrading existing 4G IBS to 5G: a simple software update?
Morgan Curby, CMO, Proptivity:
This touches on a knowledge problem in the industry. You can deploy 5G on a 900MHz, 2.1GHz or 2.6GHz but this gives you just around 12% more capacity than you would get on 4G, so is this really 5G? It depends what kind of 5G you want, whether it is a slight upgrade or real short-bandwidth, high gigabyte connectivity. If you want the latter, you need to have very high capacity to deliver this. 5G on 3.7GHz or higher is practically impossible to deploy on an existing indoor solution because they aren’t in most cases built for it.
You need coax cables which are the right length, and if you want 2 or 4 MIMO you will need to double or 4x the number of cables, which is a huge upgrade and often impractical. There is no easy fix for the capacity issue; whether it’s due to cost, time or space, an upgrade isn’t going to work and even if you do the network remains capacity restricted because you are sharing a single base station for an entire building, so it won’t support any kind of future use-cases.
We are working on a project now where the building already has a newer passive DAS installed, but we are still looking at replacing it with our new system since it makes little sense to upgrade the existing one since the cost is high and resulting capacity very low. Active DAS does have more capability, but is still often delivering much lower total building capacity at very high cost and energy consumption when compared to modern small cell solution like the Ericsson Dot solution.
Another benefit from using modern small cell solution is that we can have features in the network that combine outdoor and indoor capacity, so the IBS is completely integrated into the wider outdoor network. With DAS you have much less ability to integrate indoor and outdoor performance and there is much lower network visibility since operators only can see status of their basestation that is located inside the basement, not the status on actual indoor service since these are passive antennas. By installing small cells, you will have multiple distributed base stations throughout a building, which helps overcome this capacity constraint as well as increasing capabilities in for example accurate indoor positioning.
TowerXchange: Can you explain who your customers are and how you work with them?
Morgan Curby, CMO, Proptivity:
Our only customers are the property owners, we don’t do business or charge anyone else, we for example do not sell any connectivity services to end-users, that is the role of MNO’s. We want to be a truly neutral indoor radio access infrastructure player who provides the telco knowledge, skillset, and expertise that building owners themselves would struggle to have to manage their building connectivity.
Other important factors of being successful neutral hosts are to have great relationships with telco OEMs, be trusted partners to MNOs with the operational skills to deliver telco-grade services to their customers as well as having the authority from regulators to be an access provider in local market.
We operate a Network-as-a-Service, so we don’t sell a network; we own, deploy, and maintain the network, signing long-term contracts and working closely with our partners. One of the big challenges we see is that DAS companies are brought in to deploy an inbuilding network and then leave, so no one has any idea what is happening when something gets changed and it causes a lot of confusion between the MNO, Tenant and the building owner. We take this issue away and provide 24/7 support for property owners, tenants and MNOs.
Our customer base extends to anyone who owns a commercial building, and it’s only a matter of time before all buildings are prospective opportunities. Existing residential will probably be the last type of building to service since this has the most challenging business case, but this will also change with technology and tenant demands, and we are already looking at this for new buildings.
Over time a “wireless 5G fiber” solution inside a building could replace some of the current fixed cabling as well as many of the overlapping wireless networks and use 5G as wireless connection for many more things. At its current price point for 5G modems it doesn’t make sense on broad scale, but you can see it coming, especially with the RedCap standards that promise cheaper 5G modems.
Eventually capacity constraints will become an issue and tenants will want to have high-capacity resilient wireless networks and we will start to see more and more scenarios where 5G can take some of that load, for example 5G laptops, 5G AR glasses, 5G Cameras etc. Education will play an important role here, and we are already in discussions with government-funded buildings such as hospitals and schools, but it will likely be slower to develop than grade-A commercial buildings.
There is a discussion in some properties where the owners feel it’s the MNOs responsibility to provide coverage. For example, in IKEA, here the MNOs jointly built (and likely funded) a shared DAS to secure better indoor coverage inside Swedish IKEA stores. The reason for the variation in commercial models is due to the leverage balance between the property owner and the MNO.
IKEA attracts huge numbers of customers, who are also customers to MNOs and would expect to have data while shopping. If a large popular IKEA store or event stadium is at one end of the building attractiveness spectrum for MNOs to invest in , a multi-tenant B/C grade property with small footfall, can maybe be considered to be at the other end of the spectrum and here MNOs have little interest in covering due to the lack of return on investment.
Commercial office space and other attractive buildings sits somewhere in the middle, in the past some building owners have installed indoor DAS and paid MNOs to bring in base stations, and sometimes MNOs have accepted to put their equipment in for free. But even then, its likely this would be based on a 3–5-year agreement with a big tenant.
It really depends on whether they see a commercial opportunity in doing so, but in terms of square-meter indoor coverage, the number of MNOs who are interested in investing is very few. The other problem is that building owners don’t have the expertise to manage IBS, so MNOs are hesitant when they don’t have control or can guarantee the quality of the network.
TowerXchange: What is a typical bill of goods for an in-building project and where do you source your equipment from?
Morgan Curby, CMO, Proptivity:
Currently we use Ericsson equipment, not just because a lot of the team is ex-Ericsson but because when we were selecting what equipment to source the team evaluated 17 different technologies based on multiple factors including cost-efficiency, capacity and future proofness, and found Ericsson to currently be the best solution overall. Active DAS equipment has some good capabilities but is relatively expensive, difficult to use and often isn’t accepted by MNOs, as well as being low-capacity and having high energy consumption, which is not a good combination.
In our IBS, you have a one-dot remote antenna location which can cover 300-1000sqm depending on how open the space is. This means for a 10,000sqm building we would have around 20 dot locations. Then you would have a couple of indoor radios (IRU), perhaps one on each floor, and connected to base band unit. Theoretically, we could run several MNOs on a single band, but the normal set-up today is to have dedicated basebands per operator (MNO or private) which can support higher degree of control for MNO’s. In addition to this there will be some site routers connecting fibre to these base bands, which will link directly to the MNOs core running from outside. The MNOs can choose to connect to each building directly or to a central connect hub.
TowerXchange: Many small cell/IBS deployments are operator owned, do you envision existing IBS deployments being acquired and consolidated?
Morgan Curby, CMO, Proptivity:
For sure, we would be surprised if this doesn’t happen. We have already been approached by property owners that are today looking into doing single MNO installations that ask if we would be interested in later acquiring and integrating their equipment into our process. We could then assist the property owner to connect other MNO’s onto the property network.
While multi-operator passive sharing (towers, antennas) has been around for a while, we are now starting to also see more active sharing activity in dense urban/indoor multi-operator scenarios. Some uptake has also been seen in ultra rural areas. We use Multi-Operator RAN (MO-RAN) with each of the MNOs having their own frequency but sharing the active equipment.
TowerXchange: Looking ahead, what trends or developments do you see driving in-building, and how will Proptivity capitalise on them?
Morgan Curby, CMO, Proptivity:
The main driver will be capacity, that’s the only thing that will have a major effect. Residential properties are where people spend most of their time, followed by office space, then retail. The driver for having IBS is the expectations of customers who will assume that their connectivity will never drop. If shops have implemented mobile payment, which most have, there is a massive reliance on providing coverage to facilitate payment.
Mobile payment by itself doesn’t require high capacity small cells, lower capacity DAS solutions is fine for apple pay, but more data-intensive activities such as video calls will require much higher capacity, so when the behaviour changes over time you will need a high-capacity mobile solution indoor, this is what a small cell solution can deliver.
We haven’t even mentioned AR applications. Advanced apps such as smart shopping assistant will require massive amounts of capacity, so traditional low capacity solutions won’t be adequate. It goes back to the expectation of coverage and capacity, and it will only increase with time, so the standard in top tier buildings is that connectivity drops will not be acceptable. This hybrid digitalization behaviour in both shops and offices, is driving coverage and to some extent capacity demands already today.
As an industry we need to find a way to talk constructively about how operators and building owners are planning on meeting the growing capacity needs of their tenants and customers. Understanding how MNOs evaluate the business process for investing in IBS is key. We need connectivity to become more effective as a society, so if MNOs aren’t actively planning to provide this what’s the actionable solution?
We are seeing active sharing appearing in the rural coverage space, but this is just a tiny fraction of the connectivity value and there needs to be a lot more discussion around densification in pre-covered areas at a macro-level.
