Remote radioheads are coming

Remote radioheads are coming

Remote radioheads will a billion dollar market in five years, predicts a new study from ABI Research.

According to the merket research company the demands of cost reduction and greater efficiency in cellular base station design are leading to a rapidly growing market for remote radio heads.

Cellular base stations are now undergoing a design revolution; the trend is towards “distributed base stations” in which the RF portion (along with suitable processing and an optical interface) is placed into a weatherproof box mounted on the tower near the antennas. This is the remote radio head.

Remote radio heads are also very ‘smart’: almost all are software-controlled and can be configured remotely to handle a variety of technologies within a given air interface family. The result: greater efficiency, lower power consumption, and the possibility of placement in locations with coverage issues. A single distributed base station can even have multiple remote radio heads for MIMO operation.