Huawei and Vodafone win ‘Small Cell Backhaul Design and Technology’ Award at Small Cell World Summit 2016

[UK, London, May 20, 2016] Huawei and Vodafone have jointly developed a 60 GHz solution for Small Cell outdoor deployment and won the ‘Small Cell Backhaul Design and Technology Award’ at Small Cell World Summit 2016, hosted by Small Cell Forum in London.

(From left to right) Caroline Garbriel (Chair of judges) presents Gianluca Sanita (Huawei), Paolo Agabio (Vodafone) and Ray Williamson (Huawei) with the ‘Small Cell Backhaul Design and Technology’ award

The award recognizes global operators and vendors innovation in enabling large scale outdoor Small Cell deployment as well as its backhaul deployment. Huawei and Vodafone’s joint entry successfully made the shortlist and ultimately won this coveted award thanks to their seamless collaboration, technology breakthrough and joint innovation efforts amid fierce competition. The award further confirms Huawei’s leading position in the small cell backhaul solution area.

Huawei is the first industry player to support NLOS transmission on 60GHz which has been regarded as a key achievement in the small cell backhaul field. It will have a significant positive impact on full outdoor small cell deployment and mobile backhaul network construction.

Operators are facing increasing difficulty in acquiring more macro site resources within outdoor hotspots, especially flourishing urban core areas. Outdoor Small Cell will undertake a more important role in these areas due to its flexible features. Site acquisition and backhaul solutions are the two key issues to enable large scale Small Cell deployment and to lower the network TCO which will lead to higher network capacity and a better user experience. Huawei has proposed an operator-dominated crowdsourcing Small Cell deployment mode to break the site acquisition bottleneck.

This mode enables operators to acquire a large amount of Small Cell site resources by attracting more partners such as municipal, advertising and utility companies to join the Small Cell ecosystem. The 60GHz microwave backhaul solution for outdoor Small Cell further reduces the need for support resources to Small Cell sites including lamp poles, billboards and bus stations. This solution will enable operators to be independent of wired backhaul resources, especially fiber. It will reshape the ideal Small Cell site building mode to where there is a lamp post or power there is a site.

Building a data highway in hotspot areas and eliminating coverage holes is the key to ensuring reliable connectivity. In the future, besides providing ultra-wideband, outdoor Small Cell solutions should have additional features that improve their environmental friendliness and offer a high level of integration and wireless backhaul. Huawei will continuously invest in small cell and microwave backhaul innovation to create a one-stop outdoor Small Cell solution with a one-off deployment and integrated management. It will also further reduce the difficulty of outdoor Small Cell deployment, increase spectrum efficiency and the improve user experience.

Huawei has successfully deployed Small Cell and microwave solutions with over 180 operators globally. According to the latest report from analyst firm Dell’Oro, Huawei leads in market share in both the Small Cell and microwave industries.

In Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant report, Huawei's Small Cell solution took the top spot in the leaders’ quadrant in terms of growing market share, continuous innovation, and broad ecosystem building capacity. Huawei’s Small Cell solutions have also been named three times as the ‘Best Innovation in Heterogeneous Networks’ by the LTE Summit and won the highly-coveted award of ‘Best Mobile Infrastructure’ at Mobile World Congress in 2015.