Ukraine’s lifecell starts the first commercial use of Easy Macro 2.0

Enabling PoleStar to Reduce Site TCO

[Kyiv, Ukraine, July 21, 2017] Ukraine's leading telecom operator, lifecell, has joined hands with Huawei to deploy the Easy Macro 2.0-based PoleStar site solution in the famous tourist city of Lviv, becoming the world's first operator to use Easy Macro 2.0 commercially. Inheriting the advantages of Easy Macro 1.0, Easy Macro 2.0 supports more radio access technologies (RATs), larger power, more flexible installation, more uniform coverage, and more centralized power supply, to significantly reduce the difficulty in site acquisition and decrease site construction costs, helping operators maximize the value of existing networks.

There are many places of interest in Lviv, and the number of tourists per day is as high as 200,000, which creates an exploding demand for network capacity. Ukrainian operator lifecell has been committed to building quality networks to enhance the user experience when using the Internet. However with growing demand for data traffic, the bottleneck of network capacity cannot be eliminated with limited spectrum resources. Therefore, lifecell has a strong demand for site addition. The traditional macro base station faces three challenges - difficult site acquisition, long site approval period, and high site construction costs, which cannot meet this demand.

As an integration of radio and antenna, Huawei's Easy Macro 2.0 product is small and light. It can make full use of the abundant power pole resources in the urban areas of Lviv for site deployment, achieving the goal of ‘where there is a power pole, there is a site’. This solves the problem of site acquisition for operators and implements quick site deployment. Easy Macro 2.0 supports the concurrency of GSM, UMTS, and LTE. It now supports large power, significantly extending the coverage area. It also supports horizontal installation and adjustable vertical beam width (VBW) to optimize the coverage in high-rise buildings. In addition, the new version of Easy Macro supports centralized transmission and power supply, reducing site deployment costs for operators.

After the commercial use of Easy Macro 2.0 at lifecell, the network coverage was extended by 8.73% and the suppressed network traffic was released: the voice traffic increased by 24.93% and the data traffic increased by 22.08% in the cluster, where the solution was implemented. The deployment efficiency of a single site increases by 94% and the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the site decreases by more than 30%, creating substantial business value for the operator.

"We've been planning to fill coverage holes in Lviv for a while," said Mr. Mahmut Sherif, CTO of lifecell. "Thanks to our partner Huawei for providing the Easy Macro 2.0 solution to make it possible. We have reached an agreement with the power company to plan for a large-scale deployment of this beautiful pole site and we are planning to extend the deployment from Lviv to other cities."

Peter Zhou, CMO of Huawei Wireless Network, said: "As one of Huawei's most innovative wireless solutions, Easy Macro 2.0 can activate existing social resources in urban areas for fast site deployment, eliminate capacity and coverage bottlenecks, and help operators to build a comprehensive leadership in technology, business, and social responsibility."

The PoleStar solution is committed to solving the problem of site addition in urban areas. In this solution, the deployment of the more integrated radio unit like Easy Macro 2.0 on a pole makes site acquisition much easier. The aggregation pole site implements the centralized access of transmission and power supply. This solution also integrates value-added functions such as advertising and monitoring. Through product innovation and business model innovation, PoleStar reduces site construction costs, shortens the time-to-market, and helps operators build high-quality capacity and coverage networks.