Interview


CommScope celebrating 40 years of innovation


This year’s Mobile World Congress looked at how mobile is the force behind every emerging innovation. Exhibiting at the show, CommScope was showcasing its portfolio of wireless solutions along with other telecommunication strategies. CIE editor, Amy Wallington, talks to Phil Sorsky, vice president of wireless sales in Europe, about some of the biggest trends in the wireless industry


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ommScope helps companies to design, build and manage their wired and wireless networks. At


Phil Sorsky 12 April 2017


this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), CommScope focused on three broad areas that can be traced back to what we are seeing right now in the wireless industry: densification, virtualisation and optimisation. Phil Sorsky, vice president of wireless sales in Europe, said: “For me, the headlining one there is densification. We are seeing a huge upsurge in demand for more and more cells, cell sites and smaller cells because as we get into this post-4G world and approaching 5G world, it’s going to need more cell sites, more antennas, more base stations and so on.” Sorsky continued to say: “The detail of cell sites is likely to change as well. They are not going to be macro in nature like they used to be, they will be smaller and


Components in Electronics


many of them will still be outdoors but some will also find themselves inside places like office blocks, shopping malls or airports. But no matter how you look at it, there’s going to be a huge densification programme that will take place over the coming years.” One thing the company is looking at, and had a focus on at their stand at MWC, was capacity in terms of how they can provide more capacity, particularly for data. “Voice capacity was taken care of with 2G and 3G,” said Sorsky, “but from a data point of view, capacity is key and to be able to get this huge upsurge in data, both video and non-video data which is traditionally where it came from, but now expedientially increasing video- based data.” Recent projections on video says that video will consume around 60 to 70 per cent of all bandwidth in the coming years with sites like YouTube being a mainstream video based streaming service. CommScope has recognised this and has included this as a focus. “At MWC we showed our multi-beam and wide-beam antennas and filters which allows an operator to still have a similar footprint on the top of a building or on top of a towered site near the edge of the road, but to be able to just literally connect more frequencies and more devices to that antenna, we are seeing a huge upsurge in antenna demand in terms of more ports per antenna,” Sorsky said. “If you think back to the old


days, an antenna typically only had two or four ports at the bottom, with the sort of circular connector devices that would only take a coax cable, but we are now seeing antenna demand where eight and 10 ports are not uncommon and even 12 ports are becoming fairly popular for the more forward looking operators. So as I say, we had a big effort at the show around these multi- beam and wide-beam antennas and the associated filtering technology that you need to stop unwanted interference between different frequencies.” In parallel to the physical antennas themselves, CommScope was also running a tutorial around MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) which is an antenna technology for wireless communications in which multiple antennas are used at both the transmitter end and the receiver end. The antennas at each end of the communications circuit are combined to minimise errors and optimise data speeds and it is driving more capacity on each base station site. “We ran a repeat tutorial around beam forming and MIMO planning for LTE capacity because although LTE is very much with us and you see it, not just in the UK, but LTE services are available everywhere, it’s still not totally ubiquitous and you will still see your phone flip from 4G to 3G quite readily so there is still plenty of fleshing out to be done,” explained Sorsky. “And even within metropolitan areas, you have still got a


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