ALU may have stolen the thunder, but other vendors are chasing the deconstructed base station too. Nokia Siemens unveiled its own approach, Liquid Radio, at the CTIA Wireless show last month and even Ericsson demonstrated an integrated architecture called AIR at MWC. US carriers seem less enthusiastic than their European and Asian counterparts, largely regarding lightRadio-style networks as something for the future, but Huawei recently launched a range of microcells for US cellcos, which it says are ready to deploy now and bring some of the benefits of more far-out architectures immediately. For instance, its products integrate the radio, antenna and baseband in a single compact unit, and support SON and HetNet. Ericsson has also argued that more radical architectures will be suited to greenfield deployments, but the main priority now was to add new capacity and coverage with lower cost and power consumption, rather than to virtualize baseband processing. Huawei's Madan Jagernauth, VP of wireless marketing and product management for north America, said in an interview: "Some of the concepts you've heard from other folks are just concepts, not products. I want our customers to know we have real solutions today versus concepts that may or may not be reality.
It is not just the major vendors chasing the small cell concept. Intel and IBM have been heavily involved in cloud RAN projects (though ALU's closeness to China Mobile may have deprived Intel of a similar collaboration it previously had with the carrier). And several firms want to stretch the economics of their indoor femtocell, or Wi-Fi access point, architectures into the cellular macro network.
One is BelAir, best known for its metrozone Wi-Fi products, which were prominent in the ill-fated craze for US municipal mesh networks, and found a new lease of life supporting carrier offload. Now it is tapping into another carrier trend, the small cell. Like Huawei, BelAir is stressing that its product is available now, and it has announced its first deployment for its Strand Picocell. This has already been rolled out, to the tune of 20,000 nodes in the US, as a Wi-Fi access point, using cablecos' HFC lines as backhaul. Now it is being trialled as a 3G small cell by an unnamed "tier one US carrier", in order to relieve data pressure on the main network.