MWC2013 Antenna

© 2013 EJL Wireless Research LLC. All Rights Reserved

Earl J. Lum +1-650-430-2221 [email protected]

Mobile World Congress 2013 Base Station Antenna Summary

March 2013

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Event Analysis


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TABLE OF CONTENTS EVENT RESEARCH BRIEF MWC2013 BTS ANTENNAS ...............................3 Summary...................................................................................................... 3 Amphenol Antennas ....................................................................................... 4 Communication Components Inc./TenXc Wireless ............................................... 4 CellMaxb Technologies .................................................................................... 4 Comba Telecom............................................................................................. 4 Commscope .................................................................................................. 4 Ericsson........................................................................................................ 5 Huawei Technologies/Vodafone ........................................................................ 5 Kathrein Werke KG......................................................................................... 8 Kavveri......................................................................................................... 9 Nihon Dengyo Kosaku Co. Ltd/NTT DoCoMo ....................................................... 9 Nokia Siemens Networks................................................................................10 Powerwave Technologies................................................................................10 Radio Frequency Systems ..............................................................................10 Socowave ....................................................................................................11 Tongyu Communication .................................................................................11 Ubidyne GmbH .............................................................................................12


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EXHIBITS Exhibit 1: Amphenol Antenna Booth .................................................................................................4 Exhibit 2: Ericsson AIR32 Antenna ...................................................................................................5 Exhibit 3: Huawei Distributed Active Antenna Configuration ................................................................5 Exhibit 4: Vodafone Active Antenna Benefits .....................................................................................6 Exhibit 5: Huawei Semi-Active Antenna ............................................................................................7 Exhibit 6: Huawei Fully Active Antenna .............................................................................................7 Exhibit 7: Dengyo B19 Active Antenna..............................................................................................9 Exhibit 8: NSN Flexi Multiradio Antenna at MWC Booth ..................................................................... 10 Exhibit 9: NSN Flexi Multiradoi Antenna .......................................................................................... 10 Exhibit 10: Tongyu Hexaband/Pentaband LTE Antennas.................................................................... 11 Exhibit 11: Ubidyne Small Cell Concept........................................................................................... 12


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EVENT RESEARCH BRIEF MWC2013 BTS ANTENNAS

Summary Hola des de Barcelona! We are presenting a summary of all the BTS antenna vendors who exhibited at MWC this year. We were able to visit all of the 14 companies presented in this summary. Absent from the show were Commscope and Powerwave technologies. The show was great this year for the single reason that I was NOT robbed! I hope that other attendees were as fortunate as me. This year's show was focused on semi-active and fully-active antenna solutions with Ericsson unveiling of its second generation AIR product, the AIR32 and Huawei scoring a coup with its antenna prominently displayed in the Vodafone booth and actively transmitting above the booth. Ubidyne also had a huge announcement in partnering with Dengyo in Japan and NTT DoCoMo with its active antenna solution. For passive antenna solutions, the theme was penta band and hexa band products as Kathrein launched its new penta band product and Tongyu showcased its penta band and hexa band products. Amphenol also had a penta band product on display in its booth. Please see our annual BTS antenna report for more detailed information regarding the global BTS antenna market.


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Amphenol Antennas Amphenol's booth was in the UK pavilion at MWC this year. There was a display with baseplates of antennas, most notably a 10 port-unit (second from left). The company discontinued its multi-band products that had antenna ports halfway up the back and has re-introduced them with all ports now on the bottom. There had been a remote radio unit product via a 3rd party supplier that they have stopped promoting and claim to be working on a fully active antenna system. We are unsure if their is an OEM partner for this development. Exhibit 1: Amphenol Antenna Booth

Source: EJL Wireless Research LLC (February 2013)

Communication Components Inc./TenXc Wireless TenXc Wireless was acquired by CCI in January 2012. The company's antenna products are based on beam shaping technology, called Bi-Sector Arrays, which split one sector with two asymmetrical beams from a single antenna that has 8 ports. The company believes that the split beam antenna market is roughly 7-8% of the AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless network in creating six sector sites. The European adoption of this technology is very low.

CellMax Technologies CellMax recently re-appointed Torbjörn Kämpe as CEO of the company. The company remains focused on its low loss, high efficiency and high gain antennas products.

Comba Telecom Comba Telecom showcased its next gen multi-system, multi-band antennas for LTE at MWC2013 and its new hexaband product. Within this portfolio are antennas supporting low band (790-960MHz) as well as high band (1710-2690MHz) with multi-band antennas supporting up to six bands from 700MHz up to 2700MHz.

Commscope Commscope had an offsite location, similar to last year, which offered customers a chance to learn about sector sculpting and see its 18-beam antenna product.


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Ericsson Ericsson launched the second generation of its AIR product, named the AIR32, which is going to be commercially available in 1H2014. The AIR32 has 8 power amplifiers using a 4x4 MIMO for each of two active frequency bands as compared with only one active frequency band for the AIR21 series. Each active band supports a 4x30W transmit configuration or 120W of RF power per band. The first product due out is a single band active and single band passive version, then followed by a dual band active version. Exhibit 2: Ericsson AIR32 Antenna


Huawei Technologies/Vodafone We believe Huawei stole the show with its semi-active antenna being live above the Vodafone booth and a distributed active antenna mock up displayed prominently in the booth. The distributed active antenna will have two active high bands (2100MHz and 2600MHz) and six ports for passive low/high band. Each pair of ports supports XPOL MIMO. We say distributed active instead of fully active because each amplifier feeds a pair of dipole elements and not a single dipole element. We spoke with the Vodafone engineer at the booth about why there was only a Huawei antenna and nothing from the other major OEMs and he indicated that none of the other OEMs had a similar product that was ready for commercial launch. Ericsson has its AIR21 product that is a semi-active antenna but does not allow for beam forming, however the AIR32 is a 4x4 MIMO system. As seen in the below exhibits, the active antenna has two CPRI ports for the two active bands and passive support for 800/900MHz, 1800MHz and 1800/2100/2600MHz. There are eight power amplifiers, four per active band. Each power amplifier feeds into a pair of XPOL elements with 8 XPOL pairs per frequency band. We believe that each amplifier is 15W and a combination of four amplifiers equals a single band supporting 60W of RF power. The antenna is standard with four way diversity receive and can be equipped with an additional 2 way receive unit to enable 6 way diversity receive. Exhibit 3: Huawei Distributed Active Antenna Configuration


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Vodafone indicated that besides the benefits of an integrated RRU+antenna, the beam forming capabilities with 4 or 6 way diversity receive can increase throughput substantially while the independent tilt on the uplink can also add throughput efficiency along with the vertical 4x2 and 4x4 MIMO as shown in the exhibit below. Exhibit 4: Vodafone Active Antenna Benefits



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Exhibit 5: Huawei Semi-Active Antenna


Exhibit 6: Huawei Fully Active Antenna



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Huawei also announced EasyRET, the antenna industry's first plug and play RET solution. It integrates multiple band antennas and traditional RET components reducing cabling and external connectors. The electrical tilt components and antenna are matched and configuration data is preloaded and calibrated. Huawei is using electronic tags to automatically report the RCU bar code to the O&M center where it is saved and matched to the specific port and frequency band

Kathrein Werke KG Kathrein had in its booth the following new products:

Pentaband Antenna 1x698-960MHz and 4x1710-2690MHz in a 2.7m radome Multi-Array Antenna 3x1710-2690MHz in a 1.4m radome Tripleband Antenna 1x698-960MHz and 2x1710-2690MHz in a 1.4m radome Xpol Omni Slimpole with 5dBi Ericsson AIR32

We believe that Kathrein is well positioned within the semi-active antenna market given the success of Ericsson’s AIR21 product and with the newly launched AIR32 product. Exhibit 7: Kathrein Penta Band Antenna

Source: Kathrein Werke KG


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Kavveri We did not see any new antenna products displayed in the booth. The company remains focused on its quad, penta and hexaband products.

Nihon Dengyo Kosaku Co. Ltd/NTT DoCoMo NTT DoCoMo announced it would begin to deploy penta band antennas supporting 700MHz in addition to 800MHz, 1500MHz, 1700MHz and 2000MHz frequency bands. We believe that Dengyo is supplying these antennas. In addition, Dengyo announced a partnership with Ubidyne GmbH to develop active antennas for LTE Band 19 (800MHz Japan) operation and field trials for NTT DoCoMo in 2013. Exhibit 8: Dengyo B19 Active Antenna

Source: Nihon Dengyo Kosaku Co., Ltd.


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Nokia Siemens Networks NSN showed its Flexi Multiradio Antenna System in its booth at MWC. This system is an 80W solution and was introduced at last year’s MWC. The product is scheduled for commercial release during the summer of 2013. It has a single active band (2100MHz) and one passive band. Exhibit 9: NSN Flexi Multiradio Antenna at MWC Booth

Source: Nokia Siemens Networks

Exhibit 10: NSN Flexi Multiradio Antenna

Source: Nokia Siemens Networks

Powerwave Technologies Given the Ch. 11 filing by Powerwave Technologies, we did not expect to see them at the show and they did not have a booth there.

Radio Frequency Systems RFS did not have a booth at MWC this year. However, they are reportedly working on a "modular" version of the Ericsson AIR antenna concept with Alcatel-Lucent that would be similar to the NSN and Huawei semi-active antenna solution except that the antenna unit and the remote head could be removed from each other. We believe that RFS has been the main beneficiary of Powerwave Technologies demise. RFS is working on an 8+1 port TD-LTE antenna with 4 XPOL arrays inside for China Mobile and also a wide band low band antenna covering 695-970MHz.


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Socowave Socowave is developing a true active antenna system platform; one that is based upon a ‘per-element’ transceiver architecture. In 2012, Socowave secured a tier 1 infrastructure partner and developed a Band 7 (UMTS 2600MHz) active antenna system with full baseband unit interoperability. In Q3 2012, the company shipped trial units with programmable diversity (Active Diversity) to its infrastructure partner and set out to quantify the new capacity gains possible using Active Diversity. The test results confirmed the existence of superior cell capacity solely related to the intelligent placement of uplink focused beams. The trial compared traditional 2-way diversity and traditional 4-way diversity with Socowave’s active 4-way diversity. Measurements show that Active Diversity increases cell capacity by more than 150% over traditional 2-way and 50% extra capacity over 4-way diversity. Socowave has commenced a Beta 2.6GHz LTE active antenna system development program and intends to deliver ‘demonstrator’ units in Q4 2013 to its customer.

Tongyu Communication Tongyu displayed 2 base plates in the booth addressing the 4G LTE market. One had 12 ports (4x Low Band 698-960MHz) + (8x High Band 1710-2690MHz) grouped as a 4x3 with each group as a L+H+H (lower base plate in exhibit). The gain was 17dBi with a 65 degree beamwidth and 6 RET ports. The other had 10 ports (2x Low Band 698-960MHz) + (8x High Band 1710-2690MHz) grouped as a 2x3 (L+H+H) + 2x2 (H+H) (upper base plate in exhibit). The upper unit has a narrower body even though the base plates shown are the same size. Tongyu stated that they were selling to Telefonica Spain and qualifying into Telefonica O2 Germany. Exhibit 11: Tongyu Hexaband/Pentaband LTE Antennas



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Ubidyne GmbH Ubidyne made two key announcements at MWC this year. The first was a partnership with Dengyo in Japan to develop a B19 LTE active antenna solution which is now in field trials for NTT DoCoMo. The second was a partnership with NEC Corporation to develop small cells using Ubidyne's active antenna architecture. Exhibit 12: Ubidyne Small Cell Concept

Source: Ubidyne GmbH


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